In January 1948, Stalin limited himself to Mikhoels, and postponed the demolition of the Jewish Antifascist Committee. This was because the Boss was simultaneously watching with close interest the establishment of the state of Israel. Many émigrés from Russia had a hand in its creation, including several former Comintern activists. Disillusioned with the Arab nationalists (who had looked either to the fascist regimes or to Britain for support), the Boss decided to place his bet elsewhere. Already in May 1947 the USSR’s United Nations representative, Gromyko, had announced to the UN General Assembly that the creation of an independent Jewish state in Palestine had the full support of the USSR. The Boss’s plan was to use an Israeli state under Soviet influence in opposition to Britain, and to bar the way to the Americans. Israel was meant to be his advanced post in the Near East. So the Jewish Antifascist Committee lived on, though without Mikhoels. Mikhoels himself was buried with full honors.
The first ambassador of the new state of Israel, Golda Meir, arrived in the USSR with due ceremony on September 3, 1948. The Minister of State Security, under Abakumov, monitored Jewish reactions to this event, and amassed material for future use. Meir arrived on the day on which the Boss’s faithful henchman Andrei Zhdanov was buried. Golda was struck by the millions who went to pay their last respects to him. She did not yet know that grief, like everything else in Stalin’s country, was organized.
Meir was warmly welcomed, but Ilya Ehrenburg was commissioned to write an article telling Soviet Jews that Israel had nothing to do with them since anti-Semitism and the “Jewish problem,” did not exist in the Soviet Union. In the USSR there was no “Jewish people,” only a “Soviet people.” Israel was needed only by the Jews in capitalist countries, where anti-Semitism flourished. Soviet Jews, however, did not understand that this was a warning and a threat. They knew only that the great Stalin had supported the creation of Israel, and that Molotov had received “our Golda.” The heady spirit of freedom had not yet evaporated. An unprecedented crowd, some fifty thousand strong, gathered outside the synagogue which Golda Meir attended on the Jewish New Year. There were soldiers and officers of the Red army, old people and youngsters. Babes were held up by their parents to see her. She wrote in her memoirs that “people were calling out ‘Our Golda!,’ ‘Shalom, Goldele!,’ ‘Long life and good health!,’ ‘Happy New Year!’ Such an ocean of love overwhelmed me that I could hardly breathe. I came close to fainting.” Her words to the crowd were, “Thank you for still being Jews.” A dangerous thing to say in Stalin’s kingdom.
At a reception given by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Meir was approached by Molotov’s wife, Polina, who addressed her in Yiddish. “You’re Jewish?” Meir asked in surprise. “I’m a daughter of the Jewish people,” Polina answered in Yiddish. This was probably just part of the effort to seduce Meir. As always, the Boss had distributed the parts: Ehrenburg could write an article for the general public, but someone had to think about friendship with Israel.
It did not take Stalin long, however, to realize that ungrateful Israel was obviously leaning toward America. He need no longer hesitate to carry out his long-cherished plan.
THE JEWISH CARD
Early in 1949 Stalin launched a massive campaign against “homeless cosmopolitans.” That was the name now given to those accused of “kowtowing to things foreign.” It was announced that excessive praise of things foreign was an insidious form of propaganda for the bourgeois way of life.
The campaign quickly degenerated into lunacy. Stalinist historians “revealed” that the discoveries of Russian scientists had been pirated wholesale by rascally foreigners. It now appeared that the steam engine was invented not by Watt but by a Siberian skilled workman called Polzunov, the electric lightbulb by the Russian Yablochkov, the radio by Popov, not Marconi.… The first successful test flight was made by the Russian engineer Mozhaisky, not the Wright brothers, and Petrov, a schoolteacher, had discovered the electric arc. Whatever later Russians had not invented had already been discovered by Mikhail Lomonosov in the eighteenth century.
Filmmakers, writers, and musicians were in permanent conference, exposing instances of “kowtowing to the West,” while unmasked “cosmopolitans” did public penance. The great majority of the unmasked “cosmopolitans” were Jews.
There should be no doubt about the anti-Semitic thrust of the campaign. Stalin combined it with the destruction of the Jewish Antifascist Committee.
Moscow was fed terrible rumors that the late great Mikhoels had been found to be a spy and an agent of the Jewish nationalists. Malenkov summoned the new chairman of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, Lozovsky who was also head of the Soviet Information Bureau, and roundly abused him. The accusations against him were simple: Meir’s reception had shown that thousands of Jews were potential spies whose hearts were in a hostile state. Zionist organizations had made the Antifascist Committee their agent—witness the fact that the committee, with American backing, had planned to create a Jewish outpost in the Crimea. Lozovsky was an old enough hand to know that any attempt to excuse himself by mentioning Stalin’s involvement in that scheme would mean a slow and painful death. All he could do was to confess and hope for clemency. But clemency was not to be had. The Boss was planning too far ahead. Lozovsky and the other members of the committee were shortly arrested. They would all be shot (except for academician Lina Stern) later, in the summer of 1952. In 1949 the arrested members of the Antifascist Committee were needed alive, for the big-game hunt in which Molotov was the quarry.
The disbandment of the Antifascist Committee made possible the arrest of Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzina. Molotov told the poet Chuyev that “when Stalin read out at a Politburo meeting the information about Polina given to him by the Chekists my knees were knocking. She was accused of links with Zionist organizations and with the Israeli Ambassador Golda Meir, in connection with their wish to make the Crimea a Jewish republic. She had been on good terms with Mikhoels.… She ought, of course, to have chosen her friends more carefully. She was dismissed from her post, but not arrested for some time afterward.… Then Stalin said, ‘You’ll have to divorce your wife.’ ” A more accurate version of this would read: “Before having her arrested Stalin said ‘you’ll have to divorce your wife.’ ” Molotov said of his spouse, “She said, ‘If that’s what the Party needs, I’ll get a divorce.’ We parted at the end of 1948. In 1949 she was arrested.” Yet again, Molotov has failed to tell the whole story. I found the necessary supplement in the President’s Archive.
It turned out that when the Central Committee voted to expel his completely innocent wife from the Party, Molotov heroically abstained. But shortly afterward he wrote the following note: “January 20, 1949. Top Secret. To Comrade Stalin. When the Central Committee voted on the proposal to expel P. S. Zhemchuzina from the Party, I abstained, which I acknowledge to be politically incorrect. I hereby declare that after thinking the matter over I now vote in favor of the Central Committee’s decision, which is in accordance with the interests of the Party and the state, and which teaches us the true meaning of Communist Party membership. Furthermore, I acknowledge that I was gravely at fault in not restraining in time a person near to me from taking false steps and from dealings with such anti-Soviet nationalists as Mikhoels.” Betraying his wife was the price of liberty. As always, he observed the rules.
Meanwhile his wife was being broken down by the investigators. Three files containing the records of her interrogation and of confrontations with witnesses are to be found in the archives of the former KGB.
She was accused of long-standing connections with Jewish nationalists. Molotov’s own name cropped up occasionally in this connection. She denied everything. She even denied that she had ever visited the synagogue. The following is an excerpt from the record of Zhemchuzina’s confrontation with Slutsky, head of the NKVD’s overseas administration:
Slutsky: I am a member of the board of twenty responsible for the operation of the Moscow synagogue.
Int
errogator: Did you make a statement that Zhemchuzina was present during prayers at the synagogue on March 14, 1945?
Slutsky: Yes, I made such a statement and I now confirm it.… The rule in our synagogue is that the men are down below in the hall and the women in the gallery. We made an exception for her, and gave her a particularly honorable place in the hall.
Zhemchuzina: I was not in the synagogue, all that is untrue.
She also denied witnesses’ statements that she had taken an active interest in the scheme for a “California in the Crimea.” She denied everything. Why? Because the truth was something which she had no right to tell the interrogator. I believe that she was always the right wife for her husband. Attending the synagogue and being a “good Jewish daughter” were for her merely a Party assignment. Her husband knew all about it, and that means that the Boss also knew. She dared not say so; flat denial was all that was left to her.
Stalin contented himself with banishing her. He had a further use for her in the near future. She was exiled in the distant Kustanai oblast, where she was known as “Object Number 12.” Female stoolies regularly reported her conversations to the center. But Polina preserved her self-control and was guilty of no treasonable utterances.
In the same year, 1949, Molotov lost his post as Minister of Foreign Affairs. The Boss stopped inviting him to the dacha. Molotov knew from experience that his time was nearly up.
The Boss, meanwhile, was tying up the loose ends of the Kuznetsov-Voznesensky affair. Malenkov was sent to Leningrad in February 1949, and quickly extracted from Party officials under arrest the required confession that a secret anti-Party group had existed in the city. Kapustin, Secretary of the city’s Party Committee, confessed to being a British spy.
Stalin staged a revival of his 1937 production not because he lacked imagination, but because old accusations automatically produced the old reflex response: mindless Terror.
For Voznesensky the end had come. The accusations against yesterday’s “outstanding economist” were that he had “deliberately set low output targets” in the Five-Year Plan, and that his members “were not honest with the government.” In March 1949 he was dismissed from all his posts. The man who had once been Stalin’s deputy in the Council of Ministers now sat at home in his dacha working on a book about “the political economy of communism” and waiting for the end.
When he least expected it, he was summoned to the nearer dacha. The Boss embraced him, and sat him down to eat and drink with his former friends in the Politburo. The Boss even drank a toast to him. He went home happy—and was arrested at once. The Boss had liked Voznesensky, and had given a farewell banquet in his honor, but personal feelings were unimportant. The old machinery of government had to be replaced.
The repeat performance of 1937 was now well under way. Two thousand Party officials had been arrested in Leningrad. Voznesensky, Kuznetsov, and a number of others were tried in that city in September. They confessed to all sorts of unlikely crimes, and were sentenced to death. The finale in the courtroom was fantastic. After sentence had been passed, secret policemen draped white shrouds around the condemned men, and carried them like so many sacks right across the courtroom to the exit. They were shot in a single batch one hour later. Trials arising from the “Leningrad case” continued throughout 1951 and 1952.
A SUITABLE PLACE
Meanwhile a special prison for Party members was being built in a hurry on Matrosskaya Tishina Street in Moscow. Kuznetsov and Voznesensky were among its first prisoners. A great future was planned for it. After Malenkov’s fall, in the late 1950s, documents taken from his aide Sukhanov included lists of the questions to be put to certain important future prisoners, together with the answers which they would be giving. The prisoners-elect were still at large, but their statements were already on file. The Great Storyteller had thought of everything. This special prison was meant to hold forty to fifty people, the elite of the ruling group. Specially selected interrogators had a direct line to the Boss. Stalin intended to supervise the staging of this next grandiose spectacle in person.
He warned Malenkov at the start that Beria was to have no authority over this prison. In other words, Beria too was finished.
All the top Kremlin personnel were under close observation. The resuits of the NKVD’s eavesdropping on Marshals Budenny, Timoshenko, Zhukov, Voroshilov, and other prospective inmates of the special prison run to fifty-eight volumes. They were taken from Malenkov’s private safe after his fall. At a plenary Central Committee meeting in 1957 Malenkov tried to excuse himself. “My conversations were also listened to—it was the general practice.” An amusing argument—a scene from the theater of the absurd—ensued:
Khrushchev: Comrade Malenkov, you were not bugged. You and I lived in the same building. You were on the fourth floor, I was on the fifth.… The eavesdropping device was under my apartment.
Malenkov: No. Both Budenny and I were overheard via my apartment. Remember when you and I were going to arrest Beria—you came to my place, but we were afraid to talk there because we were all of us bugged.
Malenkov in fact was right. They were all being monitored. He had sentenced all of them to end their lives in the new prison. Malenkov had simply been chosen to play Yezhov’s former role, and to leave the stage in the same way.
By 1949 the shape of the impending supertrial was clearly discernible. The Jewish connection brought Molotov into it, as an American and Zionist agent. Molotov’s testimony would involve the other members of the Politburo. Finally, as in earlier purges, the military would be included as a bonus.
The unified society, forged in the white heat of the purge, annealed once more by Terror, he would lead forward to the third and final world war. To the Great Dream—the worldwide Soviet republic.
27
THE APOCALYPSE THAT NEVER WAS
THE SUN OF OUR PLANET
As always, an apparent relaxation of his ideological campaign prefaced Stalin’s next decisive step. Throughout 1949 he focused the country’s attention on the celebration of the day he had chosen as his seventieth birthday. On the eve of the anniversary, Beria diverted him with a letter from another emperor—Henry Pu-Yi, the last emperor of Manchuria, who had been taken prisoner by the Red army. It is still there in his special file:
It is the highest of honors for me to be writing the present letter to you.… I am treated with consideration and generosity by the authorities and by the personnel of the camp. While here I have begun reading Soviet books and newspapers for the first time. For the first time in the forty years of my life I have got to know Questions of Leninism and the Short Course in the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. I have learned that the USSR is the most democratic and progressive country in the world, the guiding star of small and oppressed peoples.… I have asked to remain in the USSR, but so far have received no answer. My interests are identical with those of the Soviet people, I want to work and to toil as Soviet people do, to show my gratitude for your beneficence.
Such was the letter to the God Stalin from a common emperor. We can see in every line how eager poor Pu-Yi was to earn his freedom. But the Boss had other plans. Since Pu-Yi’s state was now part of Communist China, he dispatched the dethroned emperor to his brother Communist Mao Tse-tung. The hapless emperor was transferred from captivity in Soviet hands to captivity in China. To be reeducated all over again.
By 1949 Stalin had created his own personal school of literature. Its main object was glorification of the “Leader and Teacher,” the “Coryphaeus of Science and Technology,” the “Greatest Genius of All Times and All Nations”—appellations now regularly bestowed on him. There were others, even more curious, such as “the Sun of Our Planet.” This was Dozchenko’s invention—he had learned his lesson.
But what looked like a crass “personality cult,” mere madness, had in fact a very serious purpose. One of Stalin’s favorite writers was Peter Pavlenko. The Boss had bestowed the highest literary award—the Stalin Prize
, First Class—on him four times. Pavlenko, fortune’s favorite, was in fact the unhappiest of men. He had joined the Party in 1920, had ties with many victims of the purges, lived in perpetual fear of his own past, and spent his life trying to atone for that past. Since the war he had written the screenplay for two films officially declared “masterpieces of Soviet art”: The Vow (1946) and The Fall of Berlin (1947).
He had in fact only been coauthor of these films. “The vow” of the title was that made by Stalin over Lenin’s coffin. Pavlenko showed the manuscript of his scenario to my father. It was lavishly adorned with marginal notes made by the hero himself. Stalin the leader had corrected the portrayal of Stalin the character in the script. Pavlenko told my father that “when Beria handed over the annotated scenario to Chiureli, the director, he told him that The Vow must be a ‘sublime’ film in which Lenin is John the Baptist and Stalin the Messiah.” This seminarist’s language betrayed the authorship of this observation. Thus The Vow became a film about the God-Man. The Fall of Berlin further developed the theme. The film ends with an apotheosis: Stalin arrives in the center of conquered Berlin not on a humdrum train, but by plane. Dressed in a dazzling white uniform (of course, the white attire of an angel descending from heaven) he reveals himself to the expectant humans. They represent the rejoicing peoples of the earth. They glorify the Messiah in all tongues. “A mighty ‘Hurrah!’ is raised.” Foreigners hail Stalin, each in his own tongue. A rousing song rings out:
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