Stalin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  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!”269

  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.4

  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!”5

  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.270 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, Mik
oyan’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?6

  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,271 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.1

  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 immediately272 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,”273 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.2

  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.