Stalin
Page 50
The sinister figure in the background was Georgian Lavrenty Beria. He was described as “somewhat plump, greenish, and pale, and with soft damp hands . . . and bulging eyes behind his pince-nez.” In character a blend of Iago and Cassius, he had a soft insinuating manner, and he knew how to play on his master’s sick suspiciousness. Svetlana hated Beria, and years earlier, Stalin’s wife had urged his dismissal. He was, in fact, hated by everyone, and, possibly reasoning that this would preclude his joining any cabal and so guarantee his loyalty, Stalin had retained him in charge of the Ministries of State Security and Internal Affairs since 1938, and had made him responsible also for secret atomic and scientific projects, while allowing him to rule over Transcaucasia as though it were a private empire.
Stalin nevertheless was aware of the extent of Beria’s power. He was about to curb that influence when war broke out. During the war, he relied on him in security matters. Indeed, he gave him the rank of marshal of the Soviet Union, an appointment bitterly resented by officers of the Red Army, who remembered the part he had played in the purge. Moreover, in 1946, Beria was made a full member of the Politburo, probably in acknowledgment of his important responsibility for secret scientific research and the development of Russia’s atomic bomb. But at this time, Aleksei Kuznetsov, a secretary of the Central Committee, was given the responsibility for supervising the security apparatus. Kuznetsov was not one of Beria’s men, and in giving him the task of supervising Beria’s special domain, Stalin was warning Beria that he could and possibly would be replaced.
In March 1949, changes in the most senior Soviet ministries were announced. Molotov was replaced by Vyshinsky as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Nikolai Bulganin was succeeded by Marshal Vasilevsky as Minister of Defense. Mikoyan was replaced by Mikhail Menshikov as Minister of Foreign Trade. The retired ministers were well known as members of the Stalinist old guard. All were or were made deputy prime ministers of the Soviet Union. It seemed to be a fairly routine reshuffle, but it was the beginning of an ominous period in which no minister or official could feel secure.
Molotov, who had been foreign minister since 1939, and Stalin’s loyal colleague since 1917, was without ambitions for greater power. His dismissal and the sudden mistrust of his master must have hurt him deeply. He suffered a further blow when his wife, Polina, was arrested and exiled to Kazakhstan. Unlike most wives of top Soviet officials, Polina had pursued her own career and had been well known in Moscow as a hostess. She had been a member of the Central Committee and Minister of Fisheries, and she had founded the Soviet perfume industry. But she was Jewish and alleged to be involved in “Zionist conspiracies.” The Central Committee stripped her of all party functions, and she was tried in secret. Possibly, however, the real reason for her exile was that she had been the close friend of Nadya, Stalin’s wife. He could not bear to be reminded of her by Polina in whom Nadya had confided. But in his last years, Stalin seems to have become more resentful and vindictive toward those close to him who enjoyed the companionship of their wives. Kalinin, president of the U.S.S.R., was parted from his wife and she was imprisoned for some years. The wife of Poskrebyshev was arrested and imprisoned. Molotov, Kalinin, and Poskrebyshev nevertheless continued to serve their master without protest and with complete loyalty, although they knew that they themselves were under a cloud.
Stalin’s malice and mistrust struck not only against his oldest colleagues but also against certain of the most prominent of the new generation of the Soviet elite. As in the past, his suspicion, once aroused against an individual, was inexorable. The victim was often relegated to a black corner of Stalin’s mind and, when finally dealt with, was erased from his memory as though he had never existed. It was this capacity for cutting a person off and eliminating him from his mind that spared him the pangs of remorse. The suicide of his wife, Nadya, was the exception; she haunted him until his death.
In 1949-50, a purge, known as the Leningrad Affair, led to the execution by firing squad of a number of senior party officials who had been brought into prominence by Zhdanov. The instigators of the conspiracy against these men appear to have been Malenkov, Beria, and Viktor Abakumov, who had been head of Smersh, Red Army counterintelligence, during the war and was Minister of State Security from 1946 to 1952. They were evidently intent on destroying opponents who had supported Zhdanov against them. The conspirators succeeded in poisoning Stalin’s mind against Nikolai Voznesensky, Aleksei Kuznetsov, and Mikhail Rodionov.
Voznesensky was an outstanding representative of the new professional elite, advanced by Stalin into the place of the old intelligentsia whom he had cleared away in the great purge. He was a professor of economics when Zhdanov placed him in charge of economic planning for Leningrad in 1935. Three years later, at the age of thirty-five, he was appointed head of Gosplan with overall responsibility for Soviet economic planning. While still holding this onerous post he became in 1941 a deputy prime minister of the U.S.S.R. and a candidate member of the Politburo. During the war, he was deputy chairman of the State Defense Committee. After the war, while still directing Gosplan, he was made a full member of the Politburo. In 1948, he won the Stalin Prize for his short book The War Economy of the U.S.S.R., which Stalin himself read in manuscript and, after making some corrections, had approved for the prize. Voznesensky was clearly one of Stalin’s coming men and possibly, so it was rumored, was being prepared for the succession. In March 1949, only a few months after winning the Stalin Prize, he was suddenly dismissed from all appointments and arrested.
Aleksei Kuznetsov had been second secretary of the party in Leningrad from 1937 until 1945. As a member of the war council, he had played an important part in the defense and final liberation of the city. He succeeded as first secretary when Zhdanov was recalled to Moscow. Then in 1946, he was appointed to the secretaryship of the Central Committee and entrusted with supervision of the security services. This meant his supervising Beria himself, and it was probably Beria who engineered his downfall. Mikhail Rodionov had worked closely with Zhdanov earlier but had not held any office in Leningrad. He had become prime minister of the RSFSR at an early age.
In September 1950, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court sentenced Voznesensky, Kuznetsov, Rodionov, and their accomplices to death for treason. Moreover, the records of the case were sent to each member of the Politburo, who duly approved the findings and the sentence and signed to that effect.
On October 5, 1952, the Nineteenth Party Congress opened in Moscow. Stalin was present but took no part in the proceedings except to deliver a short closing address. Molotov gave the opening speech, but Malenkov delivered the key report, which Stalin himself had always delivered since 1924, and this seemed to mark him clearly as the successor. It was, however, Stalin’s report that he delivered, for it embodied his policies. He was still the unchallenged leader, venerated and infallible. The Congress gave expression to this fact in the stormy standing ovation that greeted his appearance and by the fulsome references to him in every speech.
In two of the resolutions, which seemed no more than formalities, he was signifying that the party was firmly established and no longer needed to rely on old traditions to the same degree. The party was renamed the Communist party of the Soviet Union, and the words “of Bolsheviks” were dropped. After all, the title Bolsheviks, meaning “Majority-ites,” was no longer relevant to a party which ruled supreme and unopposed. The Politburo, a title with long Leninist associations, was renamed the Presidium. More important, the Presidium was enlarged to twenty-five full members and twelve alternate members. His purpose in making this change was to bring younger members into the top leadership. The party was now composed of the young, but the old members remained in office: The old men did not readily surrender power and position.
Stalin himself resigned as general secretary of the party, an office he had held since 1922, although he had not used the title since the 1930s. This did not, however, diminish his authority and full control. But at this time, he seemed
conscious of his failing strength and torn between securing the continuity of the party leadership, and at the same time clinging to power. He still had work to do in ensuring that his policies were fully implemented, but he was determined to advance the new generation of professional Stalinist leaders. This meant removing the old guard, and he knew that, unless he compelled them, they would never stand aside. At the same time, corrosive mistrust made him question the honesty and commitment of others, young and old. They would be seduced by power and position and forget the real purposes to be served. All his life he had been involved in the savage struggle for power, and he trusted no one.
At the Congress, Stalin sat through the opening and Malenkov’s report. All eyes were upon him. Their worshipful respect set him apart. He was a small gray-haired old man, failing in strength, and completely alone, isolated by their adulation and by the terrible power which he held. He led a solitary existence. His permanent residence was the dacha at Kuntsevo, but he had other dachas, not far away at Semenovskoe and Lipki. He felt truly at home only in the dark, dense forests of pine and silver birch trees which surrounded these places. In the summer, he would work in the garden of the dacha, and in winter, when the sun shone, he would sit by the windows, working on papers and receiving officials. Often now, he spent the whole day at the dacha and did not go to his Kremlin office. Toward the end of each summer, he traveled south and spent two months in one of the villas always kept ready for him in the Caucasus.
Because it was believed that he lived under the constant threat of assassination, he was enveloped by security precautions. When he traveled between the Kremlin and Kuntsevo, five black limousines drove at speed through the city, where all traffic was halted. The drivers frequently overtook each other, changing the order in which they traveled. No one could tell which limousine contained him behind its curtains. Special security guards were permanently posted at the dacha, and elaborate measures, including searchlights, made the place like a prison camp. His journeys to the south were carried out like military exercises. Much of this security was probably imposed on him by zealous officers, like Vlasik, intent on expanding their authority and importance, but it also reflected his own chronic suspicions.
Dinners at Kuntsevo, attended by Malenkov, Beria, Bulganin, Khrushchev, and other old colleagues who were not in disfavor, provided his only social life. They were working dinners at which policy matters were discussed and decided, but then they became evenings of heavy eating and drinking, reminiscing, and coarse banter. Djilas, the Yugoslav communist, described one dinner at Kuntsevo which he attended in January 1948. He noticed a decline in Stalin and felt that there was a growing tension between him and Molotov. He also deplored the scale of the eating and drinking. Fastidious, severe, and often self-righteous, he was critical of all that he saw. He had idolized Stalin as the great communist leader and could not get over the disappointment of finding him to be a Russian politician who at times revealed his peasant origins.
The dinner evenings at Kuntsevo, when he talked over state affairs and as an old man reminisced, were the only occasions when he relaxed, although then only partially. He often recalled the war; he missed the high drama of those years. He horrified Djilas when at a dinner in 1944, the second that Djilas attended, he contradicted a remark that the Germans would need fifty years to recover from the war. “No,” he replied, “they will recover and very quickly. It is a highly-developed industrial country with an extremely skilled and numerous working class and technical intelligentsia. Give them twelve to fifteen years and they’ll be on their feet again.” Standing up and hitching his trousers, he added: “The war will soon be over. We shall recover in fifteen or twenty years and then we’ll have another go at it!”
At Kuntsevo as in his Kremlin office, Stalin felt his loneliness, but did not admit it. He desperately missed his wife, Nadya, who had died nearly twenty years earlier. He blamed her suicide on her family, Polina Molotov, and the evil influence of Michael Arlen’s novel The Green Hat, which she had been reading. In 1948, for the first time, he talked openly with Svetlana about her mother, and it was apparent that memories of her troubled him deeply.
The one person whom he loved and who might partially have filled the gap in his life was his daughter. She was, however, emotional and self-centered and without any capacity for devotion and self-sacrifice. Since the incident of her schoolgirl infatuation with Aleksei Kapler, she had felt estranged from her father. When in July 1941 she telephoned to tell him that she had graduated, he told her to come to see him. He was pleased with her diploma but disapproving of her plan to go to university for a degree in literary studies. “You want to be one of those bohemians. . . . No, you’d better get a decent education. Let it be history. . . . Study history. Then you can do what you want.”
During the war, their meetings were infrequent. In May 1944, Svetlana went to Kuntsevo to tell her father that she wanted to marry Grigori Morozov, a student at the Institute of International Relations. He was Jewish, and Stalin, who had something of the traditional Russian prejudice against Jews, and who was at this time deeply suspicious of the burgeoning Zionist movement, disapproved. His main criticism, however, was that the young man was not serving his country. “It’s terrible at the front,” he said, “and look at him, he’s sitting it out at home!” But he did not forbid the marriage, as Svetlana had feared. “Yes, it’s spring. To hell with you. Do as you like!” was his final comment. He refused to meet her husband or to allow him in his house, but he gave them an apartment outside the Kremlin. When Svetlana became pregnant, he relaxed his ban. “You need the country air,” he said, and allowed them the use of the dacha at Zubalovo, but he never met Morozov.
Stalin was pleased when in the spring of 1947 his daughter’s marriage broke up. He had never approved of her husband, but he was affectionate with Joseph, his grandson. Meetings between father and daughter again became rare, months passing without any contact. In August 1947, he invited her and her son to join him in Sochi. It proved an uneasy holiday. She found difficulty in communicating with him and could not adjust to his habits of sitting up most of the night and sleeping part of the day. She was bored by the dinners when Malenkov, Beria, Bulganin, and the others came. The effort needed to show her affection and to give him her companionship was apparently beyond her capacity.
Again weeks went by without contact between them. In the spring of 1949, Svetlana married Yury Zhdanov, son of Andrei Zhdanov, at one time seen as a possible successor to Stalin himself. This pleased her father, who knew the family and respected the son. Apparently, he thought that his daughter and son-in-law might move into the second floor which had been added to the dacha at Kuntsevo. Svetlana herself observed that “as he’d got older my father had begun feeling lonely. He was so isolated from everyone at this time, so elevated that he seemed to be living in a vacuum. He hadn’t a soul he could talk to.” She and her husband refused, however, to move into the dacha, and in the summer of 1948, she declined his invitation to join him in the Caucasus. Stalin was deeply hurt, and when in November 1948 she spent a short time with him in the south, he was in an angry mood.
Traveling back to Moscow by train with him, Svetlana was again shaken and depressed by his isolated way of life. It was a special train, carrying him and the security guards, who cocooned his existence. Every station had been cleared. When the train halted, Stalin would walk along the platform to chat with the engine crew. She was convinced that he had not ordered such arrangements, and he would curse the generals and colonels of the bodyguard who got in his way. “It was the system of which he himself was a prisoner and in which he was stifling from loneliness, emptiness, and lack of human companionship.” But she realized that he, too, was at fault. “He saw enemies everywhere. It had reached the point of being pathological, of persecution mania, and it was all a result of being lonely and desolate.” At this time, the campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans” and against Zionists was under way. Arrests of people within her family circle dis
mayed Svetlana. She protested to her father but was angrily rebuffed.
For another long period, she did not see her father. Her second marriage and living in the Zhdanov household made her very unhappy. During the winter of 1949–50, she was pregnant and suffering severely from a kidney ailment. In a state of self-pity and depression after the birth of her daughter, she wrote to her father for comfort. He replied promptly, with the last letter she was ever to receive from him: “Dear Svetochka! I got your letter. I’m very glad you got off so lightly. Kidney trouble is a serious business. To say nothing of having a child. Where did you get the idea that I had abandoned you? It’s the sort of thing people dream up. I advise you not to believe your dreams. Take care of yourself. Take care of your daughter, too. The state needs people, even those who are born prematurely. Be patient a little longer - we’ll see each other soon. I kiss my Svetochka. Your ‘little papa.’ May 10th 1950.”
Stalin took his last holiday in the south in the autumn of 1951. He did not leave Moscow again and lived at Kuntsevo most of the time. Svetlana with her two children visited him on the November 7 anniversary in 1952 and again on his seventy-third birthday on December 21. He looked unwell then and was obviously suffering from high blood pressure, but he would not see doctors, and he treated himself with old peasant remedies. He had always enjoyed tobacco, and for at least fifty years, had rarely been without his pipe or cigarette, but suddenly he gave up the habit.
On this occasion as on others, Svetlana felt she should visit him more often. Friends urged her to telephone him. She hesitated because he would often answer curtly, “I’m busy!” But she knew that he welcomed her visits and liked to see her children. Behind his growling manner was real concern for them, especially after her divorce from her second husband. Often he would offer her money, knowing that she depended on the allowance of a university student and needed it. When as a graduate student of the Academy of Social Sciences she received a higher allowance, he would give her money for the children and for the daughter of his first son. At the same time, he was always insistent that she should work and pay her way, and that she should never be what he called a “parasite.”