Whether restoring himself in the south or relaxing at Blizhnyaya, Stalin strove to keep his decline a secret. He weighed himself regularly. He swallowed pills and iodine capsules — without medical supervision — to perk himself up.9 He took the waters at the Black Sea spas and enjoyed occasional saunas in Moscow (which he regarded as equivalent to physical exercise: he had long given up active recreations). Stalin made it a point of pride on ceremonial occasions to ascend the Mausoleum steps on Red Square briskly before waving to the crowd.10 Soviet citizens were encouraged to believe that the country’s ruler remained hale and hearty. Stalin himself poked fun at those in his entourage who had let themselves go physically. He baited Khrushchëv and Malenkov for their corpulence. He ridiculed others on grounds of taste. Bulganin’s goatee beard amused him. He laughed at Beria for refusing to wear a tie even though he himself would never wear one; he also objected to Beria’s pince-nez: ‘It makes you look like a Menshevik. Only a little chain is needed to complete the picture!’11
Age failed to soften his temper. Whenever he admitted he was feeling his age, his underlings protested that he was simply indispensable. But he went on mooting the possibility of stepping down from power despite his brutal treatment of Vinogradov for making that very suggestion. In 1946 he had told Politburo members to think about how to prepare the next generation to take power. According to Kaganovich, he also expressed a wish to retire. Molotov was his intended replacement: ‘Let Vyacheslav do the work.’12 This caused consternation: Kaganovich did not like the prospect of yielding to Molotov. Yet Stalin’s favour, once given, could anyway be withdrawn. He played like a cat with the Politburo mice. In 1947 he told each of its members to select five or six subordinates who might eventually replace them. Mikoyan supplied the required list of names while arguing that the individuals were being promoted too early. There was no incentive for veterans to be helpful to newcomers; indeed they could have been forgiven for deliberately obstructing them, and this is probably what happened. Within a year the newcomers, their inexperience having been exposed, were eased out of office.13 They could count themselves lucky they were still alive.
While teasing his leading subordinates, however, Stalin genuinely wished to shed many burdens; in particular, he delegated the routine management of the Soviet economy and administrative order to subordinates. He cut down the number of days he received visitors from 145 in the last year of the war to thirty-seven in 1952.14 But he was determined to remain Leader.15 He not only retained oversight of general policy but also reserved the capacity to intervene in particular affairs at his whim; and ailing though he was, he never let any great decision on international relations be taken without him. He continued to receive piles of papers from Moscow while he stayed by the Black Sea. Security police affairs remained one of his preoccupations.16 Always he was accompanied by Alexander Poskrëbyshev, the head of the Special Department of the Secretariat of the Party Central Committee. Poskrëbyshev had been awarded the rank of major-general in the war and Stalin liked to josh him by addressing him as ‘Supreme Commander’.17 Their master-and-dog relationship was crucial for Stalin. Poskrëbyshev dealt with the telegrams coming to the dacha and decided which ones needed Stalin’s attention. If an emergency arose, Poskrëbyshev was empowered to interrupt his master’s dinner regardless of other guests and consult him about the desirable response.18
On his lengthy Abkhazian sojourns Stalin kept a lavish table ready for visitors. Most of them were politicians from Moscow or the Caucasus. Conversations were held on a wide variety of topics. His dinners and late breakfasts remained a fulcrum of his despotism. He used them to deliberate with his associates, to give precedence to one or other of them and to strike fear and incite jealousy among the rest. Among the accepted traditions from the late 1940s were elaborate toasts to his health and to his achievements. It was thought impolite to fail to stress his crucial part in preparing the USSR for the Second World War and in leading it to victory in 1945. At each dacha he arranged for a bounteous supply of wines, brandy and champagne; he also kept a store of cigars and cigarettes. Stalin, a lifelong pipe-smoker, remained partial to a puff on a cigarette.19 He especially liked the company of young local officials and was an eager raconteur of his early life. In his declining years, especially in the presence of new acquaintances, he could not resist embroidering the stories with fanciful exaggeration; and his charm and sense of humour captivated them.
These younger men of party and government avidly ascertained his desires. Abkhazian party boss Akaki Mgeladze asked Stalin about his preferences in wine. Among red wines the Leader mentioned his favourite as Khvanchkara produced by peasant methods. This surprised Mgeladze, who had assumed that Stalin would go for the renowned Atenuri or Khidistavi of his native Gori. (Georgians are proud of the grapes of the locality where they are brought up.) Stalin explained that it was really for Molotov’s benefit that he stocked Khidistavi. His other favoured red wine was Chkhaveri.20 For breakfast he took a simple porridge in a milky bouillon; for lunch and dinner he preferred soups and fish — unusually for a man of the Caucasus he had no great longing for meat.21 He adored bananas (and he got very cantankerous when presented with ones of inferior quality).22 When everything was prepared, he played host in the Georgian manner and often dispensed altogether with servants. Guests served themselves from a buffet. Drinks were set out on adjacent small tables.23
The mischievous aspects of Stalin’s dinner parties persisted. Vodka was poured into glasses instead of wine. Sometimes pepper would surreptitiously be shaken into someone’s dish. It was not just horseplay. As before, Stalin wanted to keep people on edge. He loved it if a drink-sodden guest blurted out something indiscreet. He wanted to have dirt on everybody.24 Yet he could also behave with gallantry. When the Georgian actor Bagashvili opined that Beria’s wife Nina needed to escape ‘her gilded cage’, Beria declined to react despite the implication that she was living a life deprived of dignity. She felt and looked insulted. Stalin understood her reaction. Crossing the room he took her hand. ‘Nina,’ he said, ‘this is the first time I have kissed a woman’s hand.’ Beria received a marital reprimand that evening and Stalin had earned an angry woman’s gratitude.25 He may well have been acting hypocritically; but if so, his behaviour was effective; and since he was a man of despotic power, he was usually given the benefit of the doubt by those he sought to charm.
Yet steadily Stalin rid himself of those who had been his intimates since the mid-1930s. Even Vlasik was sacked in April 1952 and Poskrë-byshev in January 1953. Another target for Stalin was Beria. Ostensibly the two were on fine terms. Stalin honoured him in 1951 by entrusting him with the main address on Red Square at the October Revolution anniversary celebrations. Beria suspected that Stalin was up to no good. What worried him was the Leader’s remark that he did not need to show him the text of the address in advance.26
Beria surmised he was being set up to say something that could be used against him. He knew Stalin’s methods only too well, and events quickly proved that he was right to be circumspect. Two days after the anniversary parade, a Central Committee resolution denounced a ‘Mingrelian nationalist group’. Beria was not named in the resolution, but his Mingrelian origin exposed him to further action — and indeed the resolution specified that a Paris-based Menshevik organisation led by Yevgeni Gegechkori, who was the uncle of Beria’s wife, was running an espionage network in Georgia.27 The Mingrelians are a people with a language so distinct from ‘standard’ Georgian that Stalin had never understood it.28 (This, of course, did nothing to allay his newly developed suspicions about them.) Beria had several of them among his political clients, and — with Stalin’s consent — he had given land to Mingrelians in Abkhazia at the expense of the Abkhazians. As arrests of prominent Mingrelians proceeded in the winter of 1951–2, Beria anticipated that he would soon join them. Although Stalin had stopped the purge by spring 1952, Beria noted that he was usually more polite than amicable. These were unpleasant omens. The former head of t
he NKVD feared that he might return to the Lubyanka in circumstances not of his choosing.29
In September several Kremlin doctors were arrested, the first of many. This followed a confidential denunciation of the treatment of Andrei Zhdanov, who had died in 1948. The writer was Dr Lidia Timashuk. Her denunciation, sent soon after Zhdanov’s demise, was pulled out of the archives and used as grounds for a purge of the medical professors in the Kremlin Clinic. Pravda published an article exposing ‘the assassins in white coats’. This caused panic in the elite of the medical profession. Professor Yevdokimov, Stalin’s dental physician and for many years the Kremlin head of maxillofacial and oral surgery, stayed away from home for a week in case the police came for him.30
Yevdokimov returned to his apartment exhausted. Probably he had worked out that the authorities wanted to arrest doctors of Jewish origin. Most victims had surnames appearing to indicate they were Jews. ‘Rootless cosmopolitanism’ was routinely denounced with rising intensity. Jews across the Soviet Union were persecuted. They were sacked from positions of responsibility. They were vilified at work. Anti-semitic jibes on the streets became common and no one was called to account. It required courage for anyone to defend the victims. The campaign, which was never officially designated as being aimed at Jewish citizens, gathered force. Many leading Jews were taken into police custody. Solomon Mikhoels, a leader of the USSR’s Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (formed in the Second World War), was killed in a car crash on Stalin’s orders in 1948; the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was disbanded and the rest of its leadership was arrested and shot.31 But Molotov’s wife Polina Zhemchuzhina, who had been in detention and exile since 1949, was still alive. She was picked as a Jew who might be put at the centre of a forthcoming show trial. Security police resumed their interrogation of her. Rumours grew that measures were being prepared to deport all Soviet Jews to the Jewish Autonomous Region set up in Birobidzhan in eastern Siberia in 1928 (when Stalin and the Politburo had at last come to the conclusion that those Jews of the USSR who wished to retain their ancestral culture should have a territory of their own).
Whether Stalin really intended the universal deportation of Jews in the early 1950s remains unknown, though this is widely treated as a fact; and no conclusive proof has come to light.32 Yet the situation was developing fast. No Jew in the USSR could feel safe. The presentiment of pogroms grew. Kaganovich, being of Jewish ancestry, felt edgy. Perhaps Stalin would have spared him from implication in the Doctors’ Plot. But the precedents were not encouraging. Once purges started, there was no telling where they might end. Already Molotov and Mikoyan had been cast down from on high. With Zhemchuzhina in prison, Molotov had long feared the worst. Both Molotov and Mikoyan had been removed from their leading posts even though they remained Politburo members. But the writing was on the wall for them. Favour, once withdrawn, was seldom given again.
When he came to finalising arrangements for the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952, Stalin had surprises in store. A Central Committee plenum was held in August. This gave him the chance to take the measure of the entire party and governmental leadership, and he did not fail to encourage individuals to criticise each other’s draft directives before they were passed to the Congress. This was also an opportunity for rising young leaders to catch his eye. Among them was Mikhail Pervukhin, already Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Two weeks later Stalin phoned him early on Sunday morning. He asked Pervukhin why he had proposed amendments to the directives at the Central Committee plenum rather than at the Council of Ministers. Pervukhin explained that he felt obstructed by the fact that the directives had already been decided in the Bureau of the Council of Ministers. To Stalin this smelled like conspiracy, especially when he learned that Beria, Malenkov and Bulganin took it in turns to chair the Bureau. Always he sought to break up coalitions among his subordinates. Malenkov and Bulganin remained in his good books but Stalin left nothing to chance. On his instructions the outspoken Pervukhin was promoted to membership of the Bureau.33
Stalin then asked the chastened Malenkov to deliver the Central Committee’s political report. He himself was too frail. Not since 1925 had anyone but Stalin discharged this task. When Kaganovich asked him about this, Stalin artfully replied that he needed to ‘promote the young’.34 This, too, was scarcely good news for Kaganovich; but it was worse for Molotov and Mikoyan. At the meeting to plan the proceedings, Stalin proposed excluding them from the Congress Presidium as being ‘non-active members of the Politburo’. When listeners took this as a joke, Stalin insisted that he meant what he said.35 At the Congress itself Stalin said little, contenting himself with pleasing his audience by sitting in a prominent place on the platform. Policies already in place were confirmed by the eulogies of speakers. Yet divergences in the Politburo were detectable to the ears of the better-informed delegates. Malenkov spoke for light industry, Beria for the non-Russians and Khrushchëv for agriculture. All this was done in Aesopian language. On the surface it was made to seem that Stalin and the Politburo were as close in their opinions as two coats of paint.
His subordinates of course knew he was not gaga and had not attended the Congress just to be its political ornament: he was also listening and watching like a bird of prey. Stalinist conservatism was the order of the day. Failure to go along with the ceremonial plaudits for the policies of party and government would have been suicidal. Malenkov’s report stepped wholly over the threshold of realism with his claim that the problem of grain supplies in the USSR had been solved ‘definitively and for ever’. But such a trespass was safer for a speaker than the slightest sign of dissent.
The Central Committee plenum after the Congress on 16 October 1952 heard Stalin’s last oral salvo. Accompanied by the other leaders, he entered the Sverdlov Hall to an ovation. He made a speech lasting an hour and half; he did this without notes and fixed his audience with a searching gaze.36 His main theme, undeclared, was himself. He implied he was not long for this life. He reminisced about the dangers of early 1918 when enemies beset the infant Soviet state on all sides: ‘And what about Lenin? As regards Lenin, go and re-read what he said and what he wrote at that time. In that incredibly grievous situation he went on roaring. He roared and feared nobody. He roared, roared, roared!’37 Talking about Lenin, he was really describing himself and his contribution to the Revolution. ‘Once I’ve been entrusted with it [a task], I carry it out. And not so that I should get all the credit. I wasn’t brought up like that.’38 When a Central Committee member proudly affirmed that he was Stalin’s pupil, Stalin interjected: ‘We are all pupils of Lenin!’39 This was the nearest he came to leaving behind a political testament. Rather than bequeath recommendations on specific policies, he itemised the qualities needed by the Soviet leadership after his death. They included courage, fearlessness, personal modesty, endurance and Leninism.
His immediate aim was to expose the weaknesses of some potential successors. Unlike Lenin, he unstopped the bottles of his wrath as he poured insults on the heads of his victims. Molotov and Mikoyan were the main casualties. Stalin ranted on with accusations of cowardice and inconsistency, alleging that their trips to the USA had given them an exaggerated admiration of American economic strength. He recalled incidents when Molotov had wanted to soften the demand for grain supplies from the kolkhozes. Molotov took his dressing down without replying. Mikoyan, however, decided that active defence was called for, and he took the lectern to respond.40 Politburo members already knew of Stalin’s hostility to Molotov and Mikoyan, but it was news for other leading members.
The scenario was close to completion for a final settling of accounts. Molotov, Mikoyan and Beria lived in dread. The Central Committee set up a Presidium as its main executive organ instead of the Politburo. Stalin read out the list of proposed members. The entire list was accepted without discussion.41 The new Party Presidium was to have an internal Bureau, and neither Molotov nor Mikoyan was appointed to it.42 (Beria gained a place, but this was no serious consolation;
he knew that Stalin had often worked with a salami-slicer when starting a purge.) When the Presidium met on 18 October, Malenkov was put in charge of its permanent commission on foreign affairs, Bulganin was to supervise ‘questions of defence’ and Shepilov was to head the commission on ‘ideological questions’.43 Old though he was, Stalin still had applied himself to reading reports, plotting his manoeuvres and attending crucial meetings — and, as in 1937, he passed up the opportunity to take a vacation that whole year. The Bureau met six times in the remaining weeks of 1952 and Stalin attended on each occasion.44 Much of the proceedings centred on personnel postings. But there was also discussion of business of a distinctly sinister nature. Stalin raised the question ‘of sabotage in medical work’; he also required a report ‘about the situation in the MGB of the USSR’.45
Stalin desired to bind an official party organ behind the wagon of his conspiracy. The risk of a coup against him needed to be reduced. By moving slowly and obtaining formal sanction for each stage of the way, he also hoped to convince the younger and therefore less experienced Bureau members that his measures were based on solid evidence. The killer needed to secure his alibi and his legendary guile had not left him.
Stalin: A Biography Page 73