Stalin

by Edvard Radzinsky

  This was when the disbanded Comintern became useful. Stalin’s spies appealed to those whose friends and comrades had perished in his torture chambers with a formula which he himself had authorized: “Stalins come and go, but the first socialist state in the world remains.”

  Some of his helpers—the Rosenbergs, Fuchs—were exposed, but many more escaped exposure. I have already written about Lieutenant General Sudoplatov’s memoirs. This is a work of disinformation, intended to distract us from the real secrets. And I often recall another intelligence officer, General Vasily Sitnikov. When I first met him he was Vice-Chairman of VAAP (the All-Union Copyright Agency). This office was traditionally reserved for KGB generals no longer on the active list. In VAAP Sitnikov posed as a liberal. He even helped me when I was, not for the first time, refused an exit visa for the United States to attend a premiere of my play. He was Andropov’s man, and had high expectations of Gorbachev’s perestroika. As it happened, he was one of its first victims—summarily pensioned off when one of the new KGB people needed his job. He cherished wild ideas of revenge. Shortly after his dismissal I met him in the streets, and we got talking. “This,” he said, brandishing the back number of Foreign Literature he was carrying, “includes a documentary play about the Oppenheimer affair.… The interesting thing about it wasn’t Oppenheimer himself.…” He smiled that familiar know-all smile, the smile I had once seen on the face of the investigator Sheinin. He was silent for a while, then went on: “Beria often said, ‘Comrade Stalin teaches us that no public figure in the bourgeois world is incorruptible. You only have to know what sort of bribe to offer. For most of them it’s money. And if one of these resists temptation it’s because you have been too miserly. Where money won’t do the trick, a woman may. And where a woman won’t, Marx will.’ The best people worked for us for idealistic reasons. If I were to write down all I know about these things … I just might do that …” Soon after our conversation, I heard that he had died.

  After the Boss’s return from Potsdam, Beria relayed this message to the physicists: “Comrade Stalin has said that the atomic bomb must be made in a very short time whatever the cost.” He promised the scientists a spell in the camps in the event of failure.

  Between 1943 and 1946 intelligence reports from the United States had included large quantities of scientific information needed for the creation of a nuclear weapon. When Kurchatov, who was in charge of the Soviet project, learned that a bomb had been successfully tested in the United States, he decided to copy the procedures which had proved successful there. He had ideas of his own, but dared not continue with them once the Boss had demanded completion “in a very short time.” Instead, he would re-create the American bomb.

  The first Soviet bomb was tested successfully on August 29, 1949. Stalin had gotten what he wanted. The USSR had caught up with the USA, and “in a very short time” at that. After the explosion the Boss lavished awards and distinctions on his scientists, and said: “If we had been a year and a half late it would probably have been tried out on us.”

  The situation was transformed. Once again, Stalin had the most powerful army in the world. He now gave his scientists their heads, and they did not disappoint him. By 1951 they had created an atomic bomb of their own, more than twice as powerful as the first one and half as heavy. This was important, as he was already contemplating delivery. For, in 1951, he was already preparing to involve his country and mankind at large in the realization of his grandiose and bloody scheme. Apocalypse was drawing nearer.

  MAP OF THE EMPIRE IN ITS NEW BORDERS

  Stalin liked to repeat that “Russians have always been good at making war, but never good at winning the peace.” He, however, had been good at both. Molotov tells us that “when the war was over, a map of the USSR within its new borders was brought out to Stalin at his dacha. He pinned it to the wall with drawing pins, and said: ‘Let’s see what we’ve got, then: in the north everything’s all right, Finland greatly wronged us, so we’ve moved her frontier farther from Leningrad. The Baltic States, which were Russian territory from ancient times, are ours again, all the Belorussians are ours now, the Ukrainians also, and the Moldavians are also back with us. So to the west of us everything is normal. [He then turned to the eastern frontiers.] What have we got here? The Kurile Islands are ours, and the whole of Sakhalin … and look, isn’t it great: Port Arthur is also ours!’ He ran the stem of his pipe over China. ‘China, Mongolia, all as it should be.’ ”

  The extended borders of the empire were now surrounded with docile satellite countries. Finland, it was true, was still independent. She had “greatly wronged us” by fighting on the German side. His agents now more or less openly hunted down Russian émigrés who had taken refuge in Finland after the Revolution, and delivered them to Moscow. The Finns had to turn a blind eye.

  “Now this frontier I don’t like at all,” he told Molotov, pointing south of the Caucasus. “The Dardanelles.… We also have claims to Turkish territory, and to Libya.” His minister turned cold at this. The Boss was speaking of another partition of the world. Molotov’s fears were for himself, though, not for mankind at large. He remembered 1937, when the Boss had initiated the Great Terror in preparation for the war they had just fought. Did this talk of another war mean that another great bloodletting lay ahead?

  26

  THE RETURN OF FEAR

  THE SOCIALIST WAR CAMP

  The Boss needed an open quarrel with the West. As always, he needed enemies. With a new threat to the land of the Soviets, he could stop playing at democracy in Eastern Europe and tighten the screws at home.

  Churchill came to his aid with his famous Fulton speech. Both Truman and Attlee deprecated Churchill’s outspokenness, but it was too late: Stalin could proclaim that the USSR was threatened with aggression again. The war of mutual anathemas, the cold war which he so much wanted, had begun. The Soviet public was deluged with radio programs about the menace of imperialism and the incendiarist warmongers.

  His hands were untied. Between 1946 and 1948 he abandoned all pretense and unceremoniously fashioned his “mighty camp of socialism” from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, installing Communist rulers everywhere.

  Cominform (the Communist Information Bureau), the legitimate heir to Comintern, was his control lever. Under his direction this body coordinated policy in Eastern Europe and channeled funds and instructions to Western Communist parties. Nothing happened within the camp unless he gave the order. No independent action was possible. The Boss had eyes for everything, and punished mercilessly any attempt to decide things without him.

  There were, of course, unpleasant surprises. Stalin learned that Tito, loyal Tito, was engaged in intrigue. First, Tito had tried to annex Albania without consulting the Boss. Then Tito and Dimitrov, the Boss’s slave and satrap in Bulgaria, had concluded a mutual security pact without informing him. Tito had gone so far as to suggest that Yugoslavia and Bulgaria should form a confederation. Worse still, he was trying to associate Poland, Czechoslovakia, and even Greece with it. The Boss reacted sharply to this wild stallion who threatened to lead his herd astray. His wrath was awesome. Menacing articles appeared in Pravda. He summoned Dimitrov and Tito to Moscow. Remembering the fate of the old Comintern hands, Tito sent some of his comrades instead.

  The Boss received both delegations in the Kremlin in the cold February of 1948. He yelled at Dimitrov: “You’re kicking up your heels like some young Komsomol.… You and the Yugoslavs never report on what you’re doing.”

  The Yugoslav Kardelj, trying to smooth over the situation, told him that “there are no disagreements between us.”

  This brought a furious outburst from Stalin: “Nonsense! There are disagreements, and very profound ones. You never consult us at all. You do this on principle—you don’t just make mistakes.”

  They resolved to consult each other regularly in the future. But the Boss had made up his mind to rid himself of Tito. He knew that “o
ne bad sheep can spoil the flock.” Tito would now be more useful to him as an enemy—as Trotsky had once been. He needed Tito as he had once needed Trotsky, to punish those who associated with him. By anathematizing Tito he would tighten the bonds of obedience within the camp, and he would gradually bring back fear. The other members of Cominform unanimously fell upon Tito, and Yugoslavia was expelled from the camp.

  Great China more than made up for little Yugoslavia. In October 1949 Mao Tse-tung’s forces occupied Beijing. With the help of China’s army, a Communist regime was quickly installed in North Korea. The Boss had a firm footing in Asia. The socialist camp he had created possessed enormous human resources by the middle of the century. The Great Dream was so near to fulfillment.… But first he had to reintroduce terror into his own country.

  Molotov was not mistaken. The Boss was preparing the country for an unprecedented ordeal. During the war the generals had been a cause of concern. They had become used to having their own way, and they had tasted glory. Even before the German army was driven from the USSR, he was planning to chasten them. V. Abakumov, then head of Smersh, was ordered in 1943 to monitor the future telephone conversations of marshals and generals. Files containing Smersh transcripts have been found in the KGB’s archives. Monitoring became even more intensive after the war.

  What follows is an excerpt from a conversation recorded eighteen months after the war. The speakers were Colonel General V. Gordov (a hero of the Soviet Union, he commanded the Stalingrad front in the summer of 1942 and was appointed commander of the Volga Military District in 1946) and Major General Rybalchenko, his chief of staff.

  December 28, 1946. The following conversation between Gordov and Rybalchenko was monitored and recorded.

  R: The way things are now you might as well lie down and die.… Everybody is fed up with his life, people say so quite openly—on the trains—in the Metro, everywhere, they come straight out with it.

  G: Everything depends on bribery and bootlicking nowadays. I’ve been passed over twice because I’ve never gone in for licking boots.

  R: Yes, well. Zhukov’s resigned himself to it, he just keeps soldiering on. [Zhukov, the conqueror of Germany, had recently taken the salute at the victory parade and had been relegated by the Boss to a provincial command.]

  G: On the face of it he’s soldiering on, but in his heart he doesn’t like it.

  December 31, 1946. The following conversation between Gordov and his wife Tatyana was monitored and recorded.

  G: Why do I have to go to Stalin—why do I have to beg and demean myself, crawl to that [obscene and derogatory expressions about Comrade Stalin]?

  T: I feel sure he won’t last more than a year now.…

  G: I can’t bear to look at him, I can’t breathe the same air, yet you keep urging me to go and see Stalin. It’s just like the Inquisition, people are just dying. If you knew the half of it.… You think I’m the only one, but I’m not, not by a long shot.

  T: At one time people with minds of their own could go underground and do something about it. But now there’s nothing you can do. They’ve broken even Zhukov’s spirit.

  G: They’ll keep Zhukov for a year or two, and then he’s finished.

  Conversations such as these confirmed for Stalin that his fears weren’t all idle fantasy. Gordov, his wife, and Rybalchenko were arrested in January 1947 and subsequently shot. But the Boss must have remembered Gordov’s words: “You think I’m the only one, but I’m not, not by a long shot.”

  A number of other military “big mouths” were also shot, among them G. Kulik, a former marshal demoted to the rank of general.

  In all this seditious talk among army officers, Georgi Zhukov’s name was invariably mentioned. The Boss knew that as long as Zhukov was at liberty the clandestine military opposition would have a center. But an outsize bait would be needed to catch such a shark. He ordered his lackeys to find it. One April night in 1946, Marshal of Aviation Novikov, commander of the Soviet air force, found a reception party waiting outside his home. He was bundled into a car and, as he later described it, delivered to “some sort of room where they stripped off my marshal’s uniform and gave me a ragged pair of trousers and a shirt.” The joke which de Gaulle had heard was no joke after all. All the top people in the aircraft industry were arrested simultaneously. Abakumov conducted the investigation skillfully, and soon had yesterday’s war heroes slandering themselves. They confirmed that they had approved for service planes which they knew to be defective, with the result that a number of fliers had lost their lives. More important, they testified against Zhukov.

  On September 18, 1948, Lieutenant General Vladimir Kryukov and his wife, the popular singer Lidia Ruslanova, were arrested. The investigating officer’s record has survived. “Can you repeat hostile remarks made by Zhukov about the Party and the government?… Can you give further examples of hostile and provocative statements made by Zhukov?” The general obliged. But Zhukov’s words were insufficient: criminal acts were required. According to his case file, General Kryukov had brought back from conquered Germany antique carpets, Gobelin tapestries, several antique dinner services, furniture, furs, pictures—all loaded onto four (looted) motor vehicles. In the first flush of victory the Boss had encouraged that sort of thing … with an eye to the future. That future had arrived:

  Investigating Officer: In the end you sank so low that you turned into a looter and a robber. Can we say that Zhukov, who accepted presents from you knowing their origin, was just as much of a looter and a robber as you were?

  Kryukov: I sent Zhukov valuable lengths of cloth, carpets, crockery, and many other things. Just as I did to several other generals.

  Investigating Officer: In what circumstances did Ruslanova present Zhukov’s wife with a diamond brooch she had appropriated in Germany?

  Kryukov: The day after the victory parade in June 1945 Zhukov gave a banquet at his dacha outside Moscow.… Ruslanova proposed a toast “to faithful wives,” sang Zhukov’s wife’s praises, and presented her with the brooch saying: “It never occurred to the government to give medals to valiant wives.”

  Investigating Officer [indignantly]: You both toadied to Zhukov, knowing full well how much he loved flattery. You were the one who started calling him “Georgi, Bringer of Victory” [St. George is so called by the Russian Orthodox Church].

  For a short time after the war, Stalin abolished the death sentence. General Kryukov, therefore, got “only” twenty-five years in the camps, and Ruslanova, the country’s favorite entertainer, ten years. A drastic purge of the army was meant to be the final stage of his operation, as it had been in the thirties. As long as the generals were a united group, it was too early to arrest Zhukov. Terror had first to be reinstated.

  Stalin began, as he had in the thirties, with the intelligentsia, using once again the tactics which had proved effective in the days of the Great Terror. The intellectuals had returned from the war with “private thoughts.” As one poet wrote:

  Smoke of the Fatherland—Thou art strange to us,

  Comrades—it is not as we thought.

  Rashly, the intelligentsia looked for changes. The war, the proximity of death, the brief interval of friendship with the Allies had encouraged a derisive attitude to doctrinaire ideology. In 1946, Stalin resumed his ideological bombardment.

  Stalin asked for Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part II, recently finished, to be brought to him. Part I he had pronounced a masterpiece and awarded a Stalin Prize.

  Eisenstein was in the hospital at the time, and the Boss watched the film about his favorite hero in the company of Bolshakov, Minister of Cinematography. An eyewitness recalls that “when Bolshakov returned he was unrecognizable: his right eye was half-closed, there were red spots on his face and after what he had gone through he was incapable of saying anything for the rest of the day.” The Boss had called the film a “nightmare.” And his parting words to Bolshakov were: “We could never quite get around to you during the war, but now we’ll giv
e you the full treatment.”

  Shortly afterward came the famous decree “On the Magazines Zvezda and Leningrad.” The two celebrities chosen for demolition were Anna Akhmatova, a poet already famous in tsarist times, and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko. The Boss had been watching Zoshchenko closely for some time. Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana recalled that “he used to read Zoshchenko to us and sometimes he’d say ‘this must be where Comrade Zoshchenko remembered the GPU and changed the ending.’ ” Konstantin Simonov said that “Zoshchenko and Akhmatova were chosen because their public appearances in Leningrad had been so demonstratively applauded. Their audience had consisted of openly disaffected intellectuals.”

  The Leningrad intelligentsia were summoned to hear Stalin’s henchman Andrei Zhdanov, a pudgy little man with a silly mustache, call the great Akhmatova a whore and vilify Zoshchenko. In the course of his speech, he asked a question which sent a shudder through the hall: “Why are they still free to stroll through the parks and gardens of this city sacred to Lenin?” The Boss, however, decided not to touch them, for the present. Pavlenko told my father that “Stalin personally ordered that Akhmatova should not be touched. The poet Soso had once been fond of her verses.” That was a story put about by his secret police. It was Stalin’s practice to show clemency while getting ready for a great bloodletting.

  All the arts were systematically savaged: literature, the theater, the cinema. Soon it was music’s turn. The West’s favorites, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, were the two composers most lambasted in a Central Committee edict of February 1947. As soon as the edict was published, Prokofiev wrote a penitential letter. It was published and read out at a general meeting of Moscow composers and musicologists, who all “joined with the Soviet people in warmly welcoming the Central Committee’s decision.” Prokofiev and Shostakovich waited in dread to see what would come next. Out at his dacha Prokofiev locked himself in his study and burned the works of his favorite author, Nabokov, and a complete set of the magazine America.