296 Vlasik was despatched to be Deputy Commandant of a labour camp in the Urals whence he rashly bombarded Stalin with protestations of his innocence. But this did not place Beria in charge of his bodyguards who remained under Ignatiev’s MGB.
297 Stalin protected Charkviani because the leader had been taught the alphabet as a boy by a Father Charkviani. Stalin moved him to work as a CC Inspector in Moscow. But Beria was powerless to defend himself or his protégés. When the Mingrelian secret policeman Rapava, who was a family friend of the Berias, was arrested, his wife bravely set off secretly to Moscow to ask Nina Beria’s help. But when the desperate woman called Beria’s house, Nina was too scared to come to the phone. The German housekeeper Ella said, “Nina cannot come to the phone.” This was how the Mingrelians realized that Beria himself was in trouble.
298 Georgi Dmitrov, the Bulgarian leader, died in 1949.
299 One of the survivors of Stalin’s time, Maxim Litvinov, the Jewish ex–Foreign Commissar, managed to die in his bed on 31 December 1951. He was a perennial target of the MGB’s anti-Semitic cases. Molotov admitted that Litvinov should have been shot for his rambunctious indiscretions in the late war years: “It was only by chance that he remained among the living,” said Molotov chillingly. There was a plan to arrange a road accident à la Mikhoels but finally Litvinov died with his errant English wife by his bedside: “Englishwoman go home!” were his last words. “They did not get him,” said Ivy Litvinov who returned to London. Their daughter now lives in Brighton.
300 Andreyev had appealed to Malenkov in January 1949 to “check the treatment . . . I don’t feel good despite following doctors’ orders. My head’s dizzy . . . I almost fall over. I’m disastrous. I feel the treatment and diagnosis is wrong . . .” He was probably right since the cocaine was clearly the wrong medicine. He signed off: “I’m devilishly unhappy to be out of work.”
301 Chikobava told Stalin that some of his Armenian colleagues had been sacked for sharing his views so Stalin immediately got the Armenian boss, Arutinov, on the telephone and asked about the professors. “They were removed from their posts,” replied Arutinov. “You were in too much of a hurry,” replied Stalin and hung up. The professors were woken up immediately and restored to their positions. His meeting with Chikobava probably took place on 12 April 1950 just as he was discussing the timing of the Korean War; Stalin’s article was published on 20 June that year. Chikobava’s original letter was sent to Stalin by Candide Charkviani, then Georgian First Secretary, which shows the power of those with direct access to the Vozhd.
302 Molotov opened the Congress, Kaganovich spoke on the Party rules, and Voroshilov closed it, representing the status quo, which few guessed that Stalin was planning to radically overturn. But there were clues. Significantly Stalin changed the Party’s name from Bolshevik to Communist Party. In the new Presidium, Beria slipped from his usual third place after Molotov, and Malenkov to fifth after Voroshilov. Beria’s acolytes Merkulov and Dekanozov were dropped from the new CC.
303 Yet Stalin still remembered his loyalest retainer Mekhlis, who had suffered a stroke in 1949. Now dying at his dacha, all he longed for was to attend the Congress. Stalin refused, muttering that it was not a hospital but when the new CC was announced, he remembered him. Mekhlis was thrilled—he died happy and Stalin authorized a magnificent funeral.
304 One of these heirs would probably have been Mikhail Suslov, fifty-one, Party Secretary, who combined the necessary ideological kudos (Zhdanov’s successor as CC Ideology and International Relations chief) with the brutal commitment: he had purged Rostov in 1938, supervised the deportation of the Karachai during the war, suppressed the Baltics afterwards and presided over the anti-Semitic campaign. In 1948, he frequently met Stalin. Furthermore, he was personally ascetic. Beria loathed this “Party rat,” bespectacled, tall and thin as a “tapeworm” with the voice of a “grating castrate.” Roy Medvedev makes the educated guess that Suslov was “Stalin’s secret heir” in his new Neizvestnyi Stalin but there is no evidence of this. Suslov helped overthrow the de-Stalinizing Khrushchev in 1964 and became the éminence grise of the re-Stalinizing Brezhnev regime right up until his death in 1982. At the Plenum, Brezhnev himself was one of the young names elected to the Presidium. On his title, Stalin got his way: afterwards he appeared as the first “Secretary” but no longer as “General Secretary,” a change that persuaded some historians that he lost power at the Plenum. Until recently, the only account of this extraordinary meeting was Simonov’s but now we also have the memoirs of Mikoyan, Shepilov and Efremov.
305 The “Midget” plunged with the same speed that he had risen to an obscure desk in the Ministry of State Control and was replaced by SA Goglidze. Earlier, Stalin turned against his instrument in the Mingrelian Case, Georgian MGB boss Rukhadze, who had boasted of his intimacy with the Vozhd. “The question of Rukhadze’s arrest is timely,” Stalin wrote to Mgeladze and Goglidze on 25 June 1952. “Send him to Moscow where we’ll decide his fate!” Riumin, Goglidze and Rukhadze were all shot after Stalin’s death.
306 Voroshilov, sacked and humiliated, seems to have respectfully resented Stalin too. His wife used to whisper that Stalin was jealous of Klim’s popularity—another unthinkable heresy.
307 Stalin diligently added the following phrases in his handwriting: “For a long time, Comrade Stalin warned us our success had shadows . . . Thoughtlessness is good for our enemies who sabotage us . . .” They were the “slavemasters and cannibals of U.S.A. and England . . . What about the people who inspired the killers? They can be sure we’ll repay them . . . As long as there is wrecking, we must kill thoughtlessness in our people.”
308 After Stalin’s death, Mikoyan told his sons that “if we didn’t have war when he was alive, we won’t have war now.” This was ironic since for all Stalin’s paranoia, inconsistencies and risk-taking in foreign policy, it was the clumsy and impulsive Khrushchev who brought the world closest to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
309 Evita had died of ovarian cancer on 26 July 1952.
310 Perhaps the other two waited outside in their ZiS. Ignatiev must also have been present. But already, it seems, Beria had taken control. No one knows who stopped the anti-Semitic media campaign that night. Suslov was the CC Secretary in charge of Ideology, but who ordered him to put it on hold? It remains a mystery.
311 Five telling letters were supposedly found under a sheet of newspaper in Stalin’s desk, Khrushchev told A. V. Snegov, who could only remember three of them to the historian Roy Medvedev. The first was Lenin’s letter of 1923 demanding that Stalin apologize for his rudeness to his wife, Krupskaya. The second was Bukharin’s last plea: “Koba, why do you need me to die?” The third was from Tito in 1950. It was said to read: “Stop sending assassins to murder me . . . If this doesn’t stop, I will send a man to Moscow and there’ll be no need to send any more.”
312 Khrushchev and Bulganin did protect Ignatiev who became a CC Secretary but Beria later managed to get him sacked for his part in the Doctors’ Plot. Yet he was merely reprimanded and sent to Bashkiria as First Secretary before moving on to run Tataria. Khrushchev presented him as a victim not a monster in his Secret Speech. Most of the top Chekists of the Doctors’ Plot, including Ogoltsov, who had commanded Mikhoels’ murder, and Ryasnoi were protected under Khrushchev, and later under Brezhnev. Khrushchev’s punishment of Stalin’s crimes was highly selective. Ignatiev received medals on his seventieth birthday in 1974. The luckiest of Stalin’s MGB bosses, he was the only one to die, respected, in his bed aged seventy-nine in 1983.
Source Notes
A NOTE ON SOURCES AND SPELLING
This book is based on my research in the RGASPI and GARF archives with their enlightening array of new letters and diaries, from notes between Stalin and his fellow leaders to the diary of Ekaterina Voroshilova, as well as new research in both RGVA and TsAMO RF. But I have also unapologetically used my own interviews, and the memoirs of both participants and their families
. Clearly the latter materials are less reliable than the former but I believe they are still valuable: wherever possible I have checked these interviews against other witnesses. I have used them on matters on which they are likely to be well-informed. For example, Malenkov’s children are probably reliable about what stories their father read them at bedtime but worthless on his role in the Politburo. Sergo Beria’s memoirs certainly aim to redeem his father’s reputation but, to my surprise on checking his stories, I discovered they are fairly reliable about Stalin’s courtiers and table talk. Clearly the reminiscences of magnates such as Khrushchev, Molotov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Shepilov and those just published by Mgeladze are invaluable but often evasive or downright mendacious. I was fortunate to be able to use the mainly unpublished memoirs of Charkviani, Kavtaradze, Budyonny and the son of Dekanozov, but the same rules apply to them.
I have widely used conversation and dialogue which I hope gives a new immediacy to this chronicle, but I have applied rigourous standards to this material: the great majority of it comes from the archives themselves, specifically the minutes of Central Committee Plenums or Stalin’s meetings: the RGASPI references are in the Source Notes. I have also made liberal use of the Plenum minutes and other documents published in Arch Getty’s Road to Terror and these are referenced to the page in “Getty.” Finally, some dialogue comes from reliable diaries and memoirs and my own interviews.
I have used materials from NKVD confessions such as testimonies aimed at Yezhov in 1939 and quoted in Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov’s new biography of him; those aimed at Vlasik in 1952; and at Beria in 1953. In all three cases, the aim of the “Organs” was to de-humanize the defendants by smearing them with accusations of sexual misconduct. They come with this health warning but I agree with Petrov that they can still be used carefully. In all three cases, interviews confirm the broader truth of some of these accusations.
Finally, I must stress here my debt to the great works of Stalin history that I have used as my essential texts in this book. These include Robert Tucker’s two volumes, Stalin as Revolutionary and Stalin in Power; the many classic works by Richard Pipes; Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror; Arch Getty’s The Road to Terror; Robert Service’s A History of 20th Century Russia; John Erickson’s The Road to Stalingrad and The Road to Berlin; Richard Overy’s Russia’s War; Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism; Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov’s Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War; Gabriel Gorodetsky’s Grand Delusion; David Holloway’s Stalin and the Bomb; Amy Knight’s Beria and Who Killed Kirov?; Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov’s Ezhov; Harold Shukman’s Stalin’s Generals; Gennadi Kostyrchenko’s Out of the Red Shadows and Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov’s Stalin’s Last Crime: The Doctors’ Plot; William Taubman, Sergei Khrushchev and Abbott Gleason’s Nikita Khrushchev; Oleg Khlevniuk’s collections of the correspondence of Stalin with Molotov and Kaganovich and his works on the thirties and Ordzhonikidze.
On spelling, I have used the most accessible and recognizable versions, e.g. “Joseph” instead of “Iosif,” even when this leads to inconsistencies: for example, I use “Koniev” yet “Alliluyev.” For similar reasons, I have sometimes used Party names if they are more widely used than surnames: e.g., Ordzhonikidze was almost universally known as “Comrade Sergo” and I have usually used that moniker. However, in the case of Polina Zhemchuzhina, I call her Polina Molotova. For the same reasons, I have persisted in using the traditional Chinese spellings of Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai.
JOURNALS CITED
ABBREVIATIONS OF NAMES OF ARCHIVES CITED
RGASPI Russian State Archive of Social and Political History
GARF State Archive of Russian Federation
RGVA Russian State War Archive
TsAMO Central Archives of Ministry of Defence of Russian Federation
FSB RF Central Archives of Security Service of Russian Federation
RGAE Russian State Economical Archives
RGALI Russian State Archives of History and Literature
APRF Archive of Administration of the President of the Russian Federation
Izvestiya TsK KPSS Izvestiya of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
PROLOGUE: THE HOLIDAY DINNER
This account of 8 November 1932 is based on the memoirs of Molotov and Svetlana Alliluyeva, interviews with the surviving members of the Stalin family and children of the Soviet leaders along with Nadezhda’s health records, letters to and from Stalin, and official reports in the RGASPI and GARF archives, and also published accounts such as Edvard Radzinsky’s Stalin. Nadezhda’s looks: Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend, pp. 90–111. Boris Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, p. 110. Testimony of Nadezhda Stalin quoted in Radzinsky, Stalin, pp. 278–9. Women: F. Chuev (ed.), Molotov Remembers (henceforth MR), pp. 164, 174. Stalin’s diary 8 Nov. Postyshev was also in the meeting, Istorichesky Arkhiv (henceforth IA) 1994 no. 1 to 1997 no. 1 and Index. 1998 no. 4, Posetiteli Kremlevskogo Kabineta IV Stalina 1924–1953. Yagoda: A. L. Litvin et al. (eds.), Genrikh Yagoda Narkom vnytrennikh del SSSR, Generalnyi kommissar gosudarstvennoy bezopastnosti (henceforth Yagoda), pp. 1–20. Yagoda’s Hitlerian moustache: interview Martha Peshkova. Stalin’s looks: honey eyes, interview Maya Kavtaradze. Arm not so bad, old greatcoat: interview Artyom Sergeev. Smell of tobacco; interviews Leonid Redens with author and Svetlana Alliluyeva with Rosamund Richardson (henceforth Svetlana RR). Actors copy gait: Galina Vishnevskaya, Galina: A Russian Story, pp. 95–7. Layout of Kremlin and homes of leaders: interview Stepan Mikoyan. Wonderful time: RGASPI 74.1.429.65–6, diary of E. D. Voroshilova, 21 June 1954.
Security: RGASPI 17.162.9.54, quoted in Oleg Khlevniuk, Le Circle du Kremlin, Staline et le bureau politique dans les années 30. Les jeux du pouvoir, p. 51. On Lenin: Robert Service, Lenin, pp. 400–1. Visits to Bedny: see Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, p. 52. Beggar: MR, pp. 14, 213. N.S. Vlasik, “Moya Biografiya,” Shpion, vol. 8–9, pp. 25–7: until 1927, Stalin had one bodyguard, Yusis, a Lithuanian who was then joined by Vlasik. Hitchhikers: interviews Yury A. Zhdanov, Artyom Sergeev. Sudoplatov, p. 52. Decree on Stalin’s walking: RGASPI 17.162.9.54, quoted in Khlevniuk, Circle, p. 51. F. Chuev (ed.), Tak govoril Kaganovich (henceforth Kaganovich), p. 191. See also MR for the story of how Stalin and Molotov met a tramp walking through Moscow. Kremlin children running into Stalin: interview Natalya Andreyeva.
For the psoriasis theory, which is unproven, see W. H. Bos, and E. M. Farber, “Joseph Stalin’s Psoriasis: Its Treatment and the Consequences” in Cutis, vol. 59, April 1997. Thanks to R. Service for bringing this to my attention. For tonsillitis and sore throats: I. Valedinsky, “Vospominaniya o vstrechah s tov. Stalinym IV” in Muzei Revolutzii, vol. 23, Moscow, 1992, pp. 121–6. Stalin reprimands Vasily: Artyom Sergeev. Also: see Akaki Mgeladze, Stalin kakim ya ego znal, pp. 198–9: “If I had done that, I wouldn’t have been Stalin.” “Five or six Stalins”: Kaganovich, p. 154. Litsedei: see V. Zubok and C. Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (henceforth Zubok), p. 21. The early formation of Stalin’s character: “Joseph Stalin, the Making of a Stalinist” by Robert Service in J. Channon (ed.), Politics, Society and Stalinism in the USSR, pp. 15–30.
RGASPI 558.11.1550.34–5, Stalin to Nadya 21 June 1930. Nadya the snitch: RGASPI 85.28.63.13, Nadya Alliluyeva to Ordzhonikidze, complaining of neglect of Stalin’s call for correct training of technicians at Prodaka demiya, 2 April 1931. Thanks to Robert Service for this information.
RGASPI 558.11.1550, Nadya to Stalin 28 Aug. 1929.
On Nadya’s madness: MR, pp. 173–4. The mental problems of the Alliluyev family: interviews Kira Alliluyeva and Stanislas Redens. Svetlana RR. Polina quoted in Svetlana, Twenty Letters, p. 118.
RGASPI 558.11.1550.27, Nadya to Stalin 27 Sept. 1929.
RGASPI 558.11.1550.8, Stalin to Nadya 29 Aug. 1929. On Vasily’s studies and teacher: RGASPI 558.11.1550.31–2, Stalin to Nadya 2 July 1930. 558.11.1550.61–63, Svetlana to S
talin 21 Sept. 1931.
RGASPI 558.11.1550.7, Nadya to Stalin 28 Aug. 1929. RGASPI 558.11.1550.8, Stalin to Nadya 29 Aug. 1929. Stalin on Nadya’s doctors: RGASPI 558.11.1550.30, Stalin to Nadya 21 June 1930. Stalin’s teeth: RGASPI 558.11.1550.43–5, Stalin to Nadya 24 Sept. 1930 and RGASPI 558.11.1550.34–5, Nadya to Stalin 5 Sept. 1930.
RGASPI 558.11.1550.29, Nadya to Stalin 1 Oct. 1929.
RGASPI 558.11.1550.36–7, Stalin to Nadya 8 Sept. 1930.
RGASPI 558.11.1550.7, Nadya to Stalin 28 Aug. 1929.
Nadya to Stalin on politics: for example, RGASPI 558.11.1550.10–12, Nadya to Stalin 2 Sept. 1929. She reports how Ordzhonikidze and Rudzutak had met with Voroshilov; and Ordzhonikidze’s view on the economy of Little Kabardia.
Nadya, Stalin and books. On White literature on Stalin: RGASPI 558.11.1550.65–6, Nadya to Stalin 26 Sept. 1931. RGASPI 558.11.1550.35–6, Stalin to Nadya and Nadya to Stalin 5 and 8 Sept. 1930. RGASPI 558.11.786.123–4, Nadya to A. N. Poskrebyshev 10 July 1932.
Photographs: RGASPI 558.11.1550.43–5, Stalin to Nadya 24 Sept. 1930. How funny Molotov looks: RGASPI 558.11.21550.65–6, Nadya to Stalin 29 Sept. 1931.
RGASPI 535.1.53.18, N. Alliluyeva, IKKI, 12 May 1927. On babas: RGASPI 44.1.1.417, Nadya Alliluyeva to Maria Svanidze 11 Jan. 1926. On chickens: RGASPI 78.1.46.
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