The Molotovs, husband and wife, survived only because of the Leader’s death. Yet they both went on praising him for the rest of their days. According to Molotov, his wife “not only never spoke ill of Stalin, she couldn’t bear to hear anyone else speak ill of him.”
After parting with his doctor, Stalin dispatched another old favorite of his to jail—Vlasik. Semiliterate Vlasik had succeeded the semiliterate Pauker as commander of the Boss’s bodyguard, and had inherited his inordinate influence. In 1947 the Boss had made him head of the Chief Administration of Security, whose job it was to appoint the bodyguards of the Boss’s henchmen. In practice, he planted informers on them. But he had begun to slip up. Sarkisov, who had been planted on Beria, kept Vlasik informed on “Beria’s debauchery.” But Vlasik failed to sense the Boss’s current wishes. He not only did not pass on this information but rebuked Sarkisov for submitting it. The Boss, who double-checked everything, found out about this, and saw that the old dog’s nose was not so keen as it used to be. His drinking bouts and his incessant womanizing made him even less reliable. The obvious solution was to write him into the thriller. On December 15, 1952, Vlasik was arrested.
A verbose petition for pardon, and his testimony before the court, survive. Vlasik, like Yezhov, draws a striking picture.
VLASIK’S TRIAL
He was tried on February 17, 1955, when Stalin and Beria were both dead. This is an excerpt from the interrogation of Vlasik by the presiding judge:
“When did you meet the artist Stenberg?”
“About 1934 or 1935. He was involved in preparing Red Square for ceremonial occasions.”
“How did you and Stenberg become friends?”
“We obviously became friends because of drinking together and because of the women we knew.”
“Defendant Vlasik, you revealed the names of Ministry of State Security agents to Stenberg. Stenberg has testified that ‘I learned from Vlasik that my woman friend Kirova was an agent of the organs, and that his mistress Ryazantseva also cooperated with them.’ ”
Vlasik admitted this, but went on to claim that
“Where my duties were concerned I was always in order.… Meetings with women were on account of my health and in my spare time. I admit that I had a lot of women.”
“The head of government warned you that such behavior was unacceptable.”
“Yes, he said to me in 1949 that I was abusing my relations with women.”
“You have testified that Sarkisov reported Beria’s debauchery to you, and you said: ‘We mustn’t interfere with Beria’s private life, we have to protect it.’ ”
“Yes, I kept out of it, because I didn’t think it was my business to interfere, as it was connected with Beria’s name.”
“How could you permit the enormous overexpenditure of state funds by your department?”
“My literacy is very poor, my whole education consists of three classes in a parish school.”
Stenberg testified that “I have to say that Vlasik is a moral degenerate, he cohabited with many women, in particular with [the list includes more than twenty names] and others whose names I do not remember. Vlasik used to get me and my wife drunk and then had sex with her, as he himself cynically told me.”
One other activity of his was the subject of questions.
“Defendant Vlasik, tell the court what captured enemy property you obtained illegally, without payment.”
“As far as I remember an upright piano, a grand piano, three or four carpets …”
“What about the fourteen cameras?… And where did you get cut glass vases, wineglasses, and porcelain tableware in such quantities?”
There was much more of the same.
In the earliest days of revolution they had promised in their anthem to “build a world of our own, to build the world anew.” They had built it. So much blood, so many lies, betrayals, and murders had gone to produce them—the Vlasiks, the Yezhovs, Vasya Stalins—people of the new world created by the God Lenin and the God Stalin. The triumph of “loutishness,” gloomily predicted in early-twentieth-century Russian literature, was now a reality. Dostoevsky’s Devils had conquered.
Stalin’s death saved Vlasik. In 1955, Vlasik wrote a petition for a pardon, which contains something extremely interesting. Vlasik tells us that he was originally interrogated by Beria in person. He was astonished to find that Beria knew details of private conversations between himself and the “head of government” (Stalin) which he could have obtained only by “eavesdropping.” “Beria,” Vlasik wrote, “must have known about the head of government’s expressions of dissatisfaction with Beria after the war.”
The Boss had, for the first time in his life, been in too much of a hurry. By arresting Vlasik he had deprived himself of an experienced watchdog with no other to take its place.
Like all previous victims, Beria was required to complete the work entrusted to him before his removal. He was more immediately relevant to the Great Dream than anyone else.
The new, more powerful nuclear bomb had been tested under Beria’s supervision in 1951. Now, in 1953, his scientists had created a new weapon of unprecedented power. The transportable hydrogen bomb was shortly to be tested. Its yield was expected to be twenty times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. There was nothing else like it in the world. The Boss alone possessed such a weapon. (The bomb would not be tested till August 1953, some months after his death.)
Before this new weapon became available, Stalin had ordered Beria to complete Moscow’s rocket defenses. It had been decided at the end of the forties to surround Moscow with special formations armed with enough ballistic missiles to shoot down any plane flying toward the city. Two gigantic concrete rings were built, with antiaircraft rocket installations at intervals around them. The Boss insisted that this work should be carried out in feverish haste. The work was done by the experienced construction workers available to Beria’s department. There were six hundred rockets to each emplacement. Twenty rockets could be launched simultaneously. Radar stations tracked the targets, rockets soared … but coordination was unsatisfactory. The Boss told Beria to hurry up. The engineers were housed in barracks. Beria summoned the chief designer and told him that the system must be made to work—“or else.”
It began to work. By early 1953 the Boss knew that Moscow would soon be looking at the West from behind a picket fence of rockets.
Everything was ready: the superweapon and the most powerful army in the world, which had not yet forgotten the art of killing. It had not been idle talk when Stalin said to Molotov soon after the war: “The First World War delivered one country from capitalist slavery, the Second has created the socialist system, and the Third will finish imperialism for ever.” In “in-depth language” this meant: “We shall start a war and we shall finish it.” The Great Dream, bequeathed to him by the God Lenin, would come true.
LIGHTING THE FUSE
Ignatiev was told to get everything ready for the trial of the “Kremlin doctors” in the shortest possible time—and was promised that “if they don’t confess you’ll be where they are.”
On January 13, 1953 the country read a Tass communiqué on the “discovery of a terrorist group of poisoning doctors.” In an accompanying article, Pravda recalled the Leader’s words in 1937: “Our successes lead not to the damping down but to the exacerbation of the class struggle. The more insistent our advance, the fiercer the struggle of the enemies of the people will become.” Pravda was dispelling all doubts: it was 1937 all over again. But the incipient horror had one quite new and decisive ingredient: anti-Semitism. The incitement of a fanatical mob meant that Terror would range more widely than anyone would have thought possible.
All day long loudspeakers barked menacing messages. Their burden was always the same: “Soviet people angrily condemn this criminal gang of murderers and their foreign masters.” This was accompanied by a promise that struck a chill into all who understood “in-depth language”: “as for those who inspire these hire
lings, they must be sure that retribution will soon find its way to them.”
The “inspirers” were the doctors’ “foreign master”—“American imperialism.” And retribution, in the shape of war, was already trying to find a way to them. My family spent that winter at a dacha near Mamontovka Station outside Moscow, where several of the “Kremlin doctors” had dachas. Their dachas were deserted. None of them came out there to ski that winter.
The campaign was escalating. Pravda published a selection of reports “on the arrest of spies in various towns.” In Moscow the black limousines drove around by night, arresting prominent Jews. Sheinin, once Vyshinsky’s deputy, was among them. The sacred mummy failed to protect its Jewish custodian, Zbarsky. His role would obviously be that of “the Jew who desecrated the Sacred Body.”
Zbarsky was released in 1954, well after Stalin’s death. For him it should have been an anniversary: thirty years without a break beside the Body. Later he described his role as Custodian of the Body: “I was connected with the Mausoleum by phone twenty-four hours a day. I instructed my collaborators to call me even if a fly settled on him, and strictly forbade any attempt to remove it in my absence. All my life I used to dream about the telephone ringing and somebody saying ‘Boris Ilyich, we’re sending a car, there’s a fly in the sarcophagus,’ and I would jump up and rush off like a madman.” Zbarsky died that same year, in 1954. The Body endured.
ONE STEP NEARER APOCALYPSE
He was now more often than not completely alone at the nearer dacha. His daughter had long been an infrequent visitor. She communicated with him mainly by letter. “26.10.52. Dear Papa, I very much want to see you. Just to see you—I have no ‘business,’ no ‘problems’ to discuss. With your permission, and if it would not be a burden to you, I should like to spend two days of the November holiday, November 8–9, with you at the nearer dacha.” She was getting divorced again. “10.2.53. I very much want to see you, to tell you face to face what’s happening in my life at present. As far as Yuri Andreevich Zhdanov is concerned, we decided to part for good just before the New Year.… I’m sorry but I’ve had enough of that dessicated professor, that unfeeling polymath, let him bury himself in his books, he doesn’t really need a wife and family. I have enough money at present—the money you sent me—so it isn’t just that.” On her rare visits she was alarmed to see strange pictures on the walls. He had taken to cutting out illustrations from magazines and pinning them up. Pictures of children—a little girl giving milk to an elk calf, a boy on skis, children under a cherry tree. The pictures were substitutes for grandchildren.
That terrible year, 1952, was, as Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, the first year in which he did not go away on holiday. He had no time for holidays, or for children. The world was on the threshold of the Great Dream. He no longer invited Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and others under sentence of death. Only four Politburo members were now entertained at the dacha: Malenkov, Beria, and two recent additions to the inner leadership—Khrushchev and Bulganin. This quartet would be required to act first against the disgraced elders, then against each other, after which they would be replaced by new robots. The Party jail was now quite ready for its new inmates.
The intended victims, like Roman senators in the days of Nero, meekly awaited their fate. Fear, total fear, had paralyzed them. The atmosphere was growing hotter. Women in shops abused and threatened Jewish women standing in line. From one day to the next people expected something terrible to happen.
An ominous signal was given in February.
A PUBLISHED CONFESSION
Endless accusations of anti-Semitism were heard in the West, and the Cultural Committee’s propagandists counterattacked with a collective letter from representatives of the Jewish community, persons eminent in science and the arts. They angrily condemned the “murderers in white gowns,” and declared that anti-Semitism did not and could not exist in the USSR, the land of workers and peasants, but that well-deserved punishment awaited a miserable handful of bourgeois nationalists, agents of international Zionism.
There were, subsequently, all sorts of rumors about those who had signed this letter and those who had refused to do so. One of the signatories (I will not mention his name; he punished himself to the end of his days for signing) told me: “Yes, we signed that grotesque letter out of animal fear—for ourselves and our children. At the same time I told myself that the doctors could not be saved, and that we had to save all the others. To put a stop to the anti-Semitic campaign we had to distance ourselves, to separate other Jews from the unfortunate doomed doctors.”
The letter was supposed to appear at the very beginning of February, but something unexpected happened. On February 2 bewilderment reigned in the editorial offices of Pravda: the newspaper was forbidden to print the painstakingly prepared letter. Everybody realized that only the Boss could have suppressed a letter drafted on instructions from the Secretariat of the Central Committee. The well-known writer and literary critic A. Borshchagovsky, one of the main targets of the anti-Semitic campaign of 1949–1953, wrote in his book Blood Condemned that “the peremptory veto came right from the very top. Stalin did not want to divide the Jews into good and bad. He did not want the Jews to purchase immunity by sacrificing a handful of bourgeois nationalists.”
Those who knew about this affair were terrified. They knew that if he refused to accept the “handful of bourgeois nationalists” as ransom for the rest, he probably intended to punish all Jews. On February 8 Pravda stepped up the campaign against the Jews by substituting for the letter from the Jewish penitents an angry anti-Semitic article entitled “Simpletons and Scoundrels.” The article listed the Jewish names of the many “swindlers,” “saboteurs,” and “scoundrels” to whom the “simpletons”—Russians who had relaxed their vigilance—had given employment.
A new wave of anti-Semitic hysteria followed. Jews were sacked, Jews were beaten up in the streets. At the end of February rumors went around Moscow that the Jews were to be deported to Siberia. People knew that any rumor of which the Boss disapproved was quickly silenced—and those who disseminated it promptly jailed. But this rumor was more insistent, more widely believed, and more alarming from day to day. As in the days of Nazism many Jews tried to reassure themselves. The man in the next apartment to ours asked my father whether he realized how many freight cars would be needed and said, “No, he simply can’t do it!”
They were lying to themselves. They knew very well that he could do it. Just as he had been able even at the height of the war to transfer hundreds of thousands of people from the Caucasus to Siberia.
I still remember my mother coming home from work one day and telling my father in a whisper (so that I wouldn’t hear) that “the house management committees are drawing up lists of Jews. They know the date already.” My father feebly replied, “It’s just rumors.”
After Stalin’s death the whole world would hear of the deportation planned by Stalin. Professor B. Goldberg noted in his book The Jewish Problem in the Soviet Union that “Stalin’s plan to send the Jews to Siberia reached the West after his death.” And in The Jews of the Soviet Union Benjamin Pinkus, professor of Jewish history at Ben-Gurion University, wrote that “Stalin saw in the trial [of the doctors] a way to prepare the ground for exiling the Jewish population from the center of the Soviet Union.” “Only Stalin’s death saved the Jews from this fate.” (The Little Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, “Anti-Semitism.”) In Siberia and Kazakhstan people still point out the remains of the flimsy wooden huts, without heating, in which hundreds of thousands of Jews were meant to live, or rather to die.
THE APOCALYPSE INTERRUPTED
What did it all mean? What was the purpose of the anti-Semitic campaign, the planned deportation of the Jews, the impending purge of the leadership, and the rising tide of terror?
It is simplistic to explain this (or for that matter the Terror of 1937) by Stalin’s paranoia or his brutish anti-Semitism.
The Boss was a cold
pragmatist who, throughout the twenty-five years in which he held absolute power, always had precise reasons for his monstrous actions.
My father often repeated a remark made by someone else about Stalin: “Woe betide the victim of such slow jaws.”
Stalin, of course, disliked Jews, but he never acted simply to gratify his likes and dislikes. Some of his most trusted associates were Jews, amongst them Kaganovich, third man in the state, and Mekhlis, who had been his secretary and during the war was put in charge of the Political Administration of the Soviet army.
What then was the point of it all?
Could someone as cunning as Stalin fail to understand that his official anti-Semitism would create a wave of revulsion against the USSR in the West, and above all in the United States? That the deportation of Jews could exacerbate American hostility to a dangerous degree?
A strange question. The fact is that for some reason he wanted this confrontation, wanted to fall out with the West once and for all!
Then again—why was he planning a new wave of terror? The Great Terror in the thirties was intended to create a unified society, implicitly obeying the Boss. The terror planned in 1953 had the same aims. It was meant to reestablish the discipline which had been impaired by the war, to bring back the fear which was gradually disappearing, so as to establish once again a unified society implicitly obedient to the Boss.
But, as Molotov correctly explained to Chuyev, the ultimate aim of the Terror in the thirties was to prepare the country for war.
It was the same in the fifties—the Boss needed the terror which he planned in order to …
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