Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  The ghastly revelations of the Nazi Holocaust, the Mikhoels tour and the attractions of Zionism to give the Jewish people a safe haven, softened the stern internationalism of even the highest Bolsheviks. Stalin tolerated this but encouraged a traditional anti-Semitic reaction. When casting Ivan the Terrible, Part Two, Bolshakov openly rejected one actress because “her Semitic features are clearly visible.” Anyone too Jewish-looking was sacked.

  When the advancing Soviet Army exposed Hitler’s unique Jewish genocide, Khrushchev, the Ukrainian boss, resisted any special treatment for Jews staggering home from the death camps. He even refused to return their homes, which had meanwhile been occupied by Ukrainians. This habitual anti-Semite grumbled that “Abramoviches” were preying on his fiefdom “like crows.”

  This sparked a genuine debate around Stalin. Mikhoels complained to Molotov that “after the Jewish catastrophe, the local authorities pay no attention.” Molotov forwarded this to Beria who, to his credit, was sympathetic. Beria demanded that Khrushchev help the Jews who “were more repressed than any others by the Germans.” In this he was taking a risk since Stalin had decreed that all Soviet citizens suffered equally. Stalin later suspected Beria of being too close to the Jews, perhaps the origin of the rumour that Beria himself was a “secret” Jew. Molotov forwarded Beria’s order. Khrushchev agreed to help his “Abramoviches.”

  Encouraged by this growing sympathy, Mikhoels and his colleague Fefer, a poet263 and MGB plant, suggested a Jewish republic in the Crimea (now empty of Tartars), or in Saratov (now empty of the Volga Germans) to Molotov and his deputy in charge of the JAFC, Lozovsky. Molotov thought the Volga German idea ridiculous, “it’s impossible to see a Jew on a tractor,” but preferred the Crimea: “Why don’t you write a memorandum to me and Comrade Stalin, and we’ll see.”

  “Everyone,” recalls Vladimir Redens, “believed Jewish Crimea would happen.” Molotov, showing more independence than before, may have discussed this with Beria but his judgement almost cost him his life. Most of those involved were dead within five years.

  On 2 February 1944 Mikhoels delivered his letter to Molotov, copied to Stalin who now decided that the actor had moved from Soviet to Jewish propaganda. Stalin, with his acute awareness of anti-Semitism, sent Kaganovich to pour cold water on the idea of this “Jewish California”: “Only actors and poets could come up with such a scheme,” he said, that was “worth nothing in practice!” Zhdanov supervised the making of lists of Jews in different departments and recommended closing down the JAFC.264 Like Molotov in 1939, Zhdanov loosed his hounds against Jews in the apparat which, he said, had become “some kind of synagogue.”

  Stalin’s anti-Semitism remained a mixture of old-fashioned prejudice, suspicion of a people without a land, and distrust, since his enemies were often Jewish. He was so unabashed that he openly told Roosevelt at Yalta that the Jews were “middlemen, profiteers and parasites.” But after 1945, there was a change: Stalin emerged as a vicious and obsessional anti-Semite.

  Always supremely political, this was partly a pragmatic judgement: it matched his new Russian nationalism. The supremacy of America with its powerful Jewish community made his own Jews, with their U.S. connections restored during the war, appear a disloyal Fifth Column. His suspicion of the Jews was another facet of his inferiority complex towards America as well as a symptom of his fear of the new self-assertive confidence of his own victorious people. It was also a way to control his old comrades whose Jewish connections symbolized their new cosmopolitan confidence after victory. Equally, he loathed any people with mixed loyalties: he noticed the Holocaust had touched and awakened Soviet Jewry even among the magnates. His new anti-Semitism flowed from his own seething paranoia, exacerbated when Fate entangled the Jews in his family.

  Yet he still played the internationalist, often attacking people for antiSemitism and rewarding Jews in public, from Mekhlis to the novelist Ehrenburg. Soon this malevolent whirlpool threatened to consume Molotov, Beria and his own clan.1

  “As soon as hostilities end,” Stalin said at Yalta, “the soldiers are forgotten and lapse into oblivion.” He wished this was so but the prestige of Marshal Zhukov had never been higher. The Western press even acclaimed him as Stalin’s successor. Stalin liked Zhukov but “didn’t recognize personal ties” and he probed to see if this idea had any support.

  “I’m getting old,” he casually told Budyonny, his old pal and Zhukov’s friend. “What do you think of Zhukov succeeding me?”

  “I approve of Zhukov,” he replied, “but he’s a complicated character.”

  “You managed to govern him,” said Stalin, “and I can manage him too.”

  Stalin “managed” Zhukov by using the Aviators’ Case against him, torturing Air Marshal Novikov to implicate him.265 “Broken morally, brought to desperation, sleepless nights, I signed,” admitted Novikov later. Abakumov tortured seventy other generals to get the necessary evidence. In March, Zhukov was recalled to Moscow. Instead of reporting directly to the Generalissimo, he was summoned by Stalin’s deputy as Armed Forces Minister, Bulganin, “the Plumber” (as Beria called him) who was in high favour. Zhukov grumbled at Bulganin’s arrogance and Bulganin grumbled that Zhukov had pulled rank on him, resisting orders from the Party. Stalin ordered “the Plumber” to prepare a kangaroo court against Zhukov.

  Abakumov searched Zhukov’s homes which turned out to be an Aladdin’s cave of booty: “We can simply say,” Abakumov reportedly gleefully to Stalin, “that Zhukov’s dacha is a museum,” filled with gold, 323 furs, 400 metres of velvet and silk. There were so many paintings, some even hung in the kitchen. Zhukov even went so far as to hang over his bed “a huge canvas depicting two naked women . . . we did not find a single Soviet book.” Then there were “twenty unique shotguns from Holland & Holland.”

  They left the trophies (returning for them in 1948) but for now they bizarrely confiscated a doll of one of the Marshal’s daughters, and his memoirs: “Leave history writing to the historians,” Stalin warned Zhukov.

  In early June, Zhukov was summoned to the Supreme Military Council. Stalin strode in “as gloomy as a black cloud.” Without a word, he tossed a note to Shtemenko.

  “Read it,” he snapped. Shtemenko read out Novikov’s testimony that Zhukov had claimed credit for the Soviet victory, criticized Stalin and created his own clique. He had even awarded a medal to the starlet Lydia Ruslanova, with whom he may have been having an affair.

  This was “intolerable,” declared Stalin, turning to the generals. Budyonny (who had been coached by Bulganin) vaguely criticized his friend but not damningly. Zhukov’s rival, Koniev, called him difficult but honest. Only Golikov, whom Zhukov had removed from the Voronezh Front in 1943, really denounced him. But Molotov, Beria and Bulganin attacked the Marshal for “Bonapartism,” demanding that Zhukov “be put in his place.” Zhukov defended himself but admitted to having inflated his importance.

  “What shall we do with Zhukov?” asked Stalin who, typically, had expressed no opinion. The potentates wanted him repressed, the soldiers did not. Stalin, seeing this was not 1937, suggested demoting Zhukov to the Odessa Military District. The Terror against the victors was a deliberate policy, with Admiral Kuznetzov, among others, arrested (though also only demoted). Ex-Marshal Kulik was bugged grumbling on his telephone that politicians were stealing the credit from the soldiers. This was heresy: he was quietly shot in 1950. Zhukov himself was expelled from the CC, his trophies confiscated, friends tortured, and then further demoted to the Urals. He suffered a heart attack but Stalin never let Abakumov arrest him for planning a Bonapartist coup: “I don’t trust anyone who says Zhukov could do this. I know him very well. He’s a straightforward, sharp person able to speak plainly to anyone but he’ll never go against the CC.”

  Finally Stalin demonstrated the subordination of the generals by writing this note to the Politburo: “I propose Comrade Bulganin be promoted to Marshal for his distinction in the Patriotic War.” In case anyone wished to query
“the Plumber’’ ’s utterly undistinguished war—and civilian— record, Stalin added: “I think my reason requires no discussion—it’s absolutely clear.”2

  Zhukov was not alone in his “museum” of gold and paintings. Corruption is the untold story of Stalin’s post-war Terror: the magnates and marshals plundered Europe with the avarice of Göring, though with much more justification after what the Germans had done to Russia. This imperial élite cast aside much of their old “Bolshevik modesty.” Yet “Comrade Stalin,” foreign visitors were told, “cannot endure immorality” though he had always believed that conquerors could help themselves to some booty and local girls. He laughed about the luxuries of his generals with their courtesans and batmen yet his archives overflow with denunciations of corruption which he usually filed away for later.

  The marshals benefited from the feudal etiquette of plundering whereby officers stole their booty and then paid a sort of tribute to their superiors. Some needed no such help: Air Marshal Golovanov, one of Stalin’s favourites, dismantled Goebbels’ country house and flew it back to Moscow, an exploit that ruined his career.

  The soldiers reached the treasures first but it was the Chekists who enjoyed the best swag. At Gagra, Beria pursued and impressed female athletes in a fleet of plundered speedboats. Abakumov drove around Moscow in Italian sports cars, looted Germany with Göringesque extravagance, sent planes to Berlin to commandeer Potemkinesque quantities of underwear, assembling an antique treasure trove like a department store. He flew in the German film star and international woman of mystery, Olga Chekhova, for an affair. When actress Tatiana Okunevskaya (already raped by Beria) refused him, she got seven years in the Gulags. Stalin’s staff were mired in corruption. Vlasik, the vizier who ran a luxurious empire of food, drink and mansions, entertained his courtesans at official rest homes with a crew of raffish painters, thuggish Chekists and sybaritic bureaucrats. Limousines delivered the “concubines,” who received apartments, caviar, tickets, to Red Square parades and football games. Vlasik seduced his friends’ wives by showing them his photographs of Stalin and maps of Potsdam. He even pilfered Stalin’s own houses, stripping his villa at Potsdam, stealing 100 pieces of porcelain, pianos, clocks, cars, three bulls and two horses, transported home in MGB trains and planes. He spent much of the Potsdam Conference drinking, fornicating, or stealing.

  Then there was the massive wastage of food at Stalin’s dachas. Vlasik was soon denounced for selling off the extra caviar, probably by Beria whom he had denounced in turn. In 1947, he was almost arrested but, instead, Stalin let him explain his sins: “Every time, the mealtime was changed by [Stalin], part of the dishes were not used. They were distributed among the staff.” Stalin forgave him—and ordered less food than before. Vlasik kept his job.

  Yet Vlasik’s mistresses, like Beria’s pimps, informed on him to Abakumov who in turn was denounced by his MGB rival, General Serov, who wrote to Stalin about the Minister’s corruption and debauchery. Stalin stored the letters for later use. Serov himself was said to have stolen the crown of the King of Belgium. By now courtesans, procurers and MGB generals were informing on each other in a merry-go-round of sexual favours and betrayals.

  Stalin’s potentates now existed in a hothouse of rarefied privilege, their offices bedecked with fine Persian carpets and broad oil paintings.266 Their houses were palatial: the Moscow boss now occupied the whole of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich’s palace. Stalin himself fostered this new imperial era when, after Yalta, he took a fancy to Nicholas II’s Livadia and Prince Vorontsov’s Alupka Palaces: “Put these palaces in order,” Stalin wrote to Beria on 27 February 1945. “Prepare for responsible workers.” He so liked Alexander III’s palace at Sosnovka in the Crimea that he had a dacha built there which he only visited once. Henceforth, the magnates and their children booked these palaces through the MGB 9th Department: Stepan Mikoyan honeymooned at Vorontsov’s palace; Stalin himself holidayed at Livadia. The families flew south on a special section of the State airline—Sergo Mikoyan remembers flying home on this with Poskrebyshev. The children enjoyed their privileges but had to set an example and follow Party dictums: when Zhdanov denounced jazz, Khrushchev broke his son’s beloved jazz records in a temper.

  Svetlana Stalin noticed how the dachas of the Mikoyans, Molotovs and Voroshilovs were “crammed with gifts from workers . . . rugs, gold Caucasian weapons, porcelain” which they received like “the medieval custom of vassals paying tribute.” The magnates travelled in armoured ZiS limousines, based on the American Packards, on Stalin’s orders, followed by another “tail” of Chekists, with sirens blaring. Muscovites called this procession “a dog’s wedding.”

  An entire detachment, commanded by a colonel or a general, was assigned to each leader, actually living at their dachas, half an extended family, half MGB informers. There were so many of them that each Politburo family was able to form a volleyball team, with the Berias playing the Kaganoviches. But Kaganovich refused to play on his own team: “Beria always wins and I want to be on the winning side,” he said. In MGB vernacular, the magnate was called “the subject,” their house “the object” and the guards “attachments to the subject,” so the children used to laugh when they heard them say, “The subject’s on his way to the object.” Malenkov often walked to the Kremlin from Granovsky Street surrounded by a phalanx of “attachments.”

  The Politburo ladies now had their own haute couture designer. All the “top ten families” went to the atelier on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, controlled by an MGB department where Abram (Donjat Ignatovich according to Nina Khrushcheva) Lerner and Nina Adzhubei designed the men’s suits and the women’s dresses. Lerner was a traditional Jewish tailor who designed uniforms including Stalin’s Generalissimo extravaganza. If he was the Politburo’s Dior, Nina Adzhubei, “short, round, pug-nosed and very strong,” trained by “monks in a monastery,” was its Chanel. Heaps of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue lay around. She would either copy fashions from Dior, from Vogue or Harper’s or design her own, “but she was as good as Chanel,” says her client Martha Peshkova, Beria’s daughter-in-law. “You didn’t have to pay if you didn’t ask the price,” explains Sergo Mikoyan. “My mother always paid but Polina Molotova didn’t.” This practice was finally denounced, like everything else, to Stalin who reprimanded the Politburo: Ashken Mikoyan threw the bills in Anastas’s face, proving she always paid. Adzhubei “made Svetlana Stalin’s first dress.”267

  The dressmaker was discovered by Nina Beria but Polina Molotova, the grand “first lady,” was her best client. Once the grandees of Victorian Europe had taken the waters at the Bohemian resort of Carlsbad. Now Zinaida Zhdanova and Nina Beria held court there. “Lavishly dressed and covered in furs,” with her daughter in a “mink stole,” Polina often arrived at the same spa in an official plane with an entourage of fifty. Her daughter Svetlana, a “real Bolshevik princess,” was chauffeured daily to the Institute of Foreign Relations, where many of the élite studied, arriving in a cloud of Chanel No. 5, “wearing a new outfit every day.”

  Stalin retained his control of these privileges, continuing to choose the cars for every leader so that Zhdanov received an armoured Packard, a normal Packard and a ZiS 110, Beria got an armoured Packard, a ZiS and a Mercedes, while Poskrebyshev got a Cadillac and a Buick. He consoled the family of Shcherbakov, the Moscow boss who died of alcoholism, with a shower of cash.268 Stalin specified: “Give them an apartment with a dacha, rights to the Kremlin Hospital, limousine . . . NKVD special staff . . . teacher for children . . .” He awarded Shcherbakov’s widow 2,000 roubles a month, his sons 1,000 a month until graduation, his mother 700 a month, his sister 300. His wife also received a lump sum of 200,000 roubles and his mother 50,000 roubles—sums of unthinkable munificence for the average worker. Here was Stalin’s new imperial order. 3

  “Crown Prince” Vasily set a new standard for corruption, debauchery and caprice. Even when officers complained about him to Stalin, they used a special formula to define Vasily’s sacred
place: “He is close to the Soviet people because he is your son.” Yet beneath the arrogance, Vasily was the most terrified of all the courtiers: Stalin scoffed that he would “walk through fire” if he ordered it. Vasily especially feared the future.

  “I’ve only got two ways out,” he told Artyom. “The pistol or drink! If I use the pistol, I’ll cause Father a lot of trouble. But when he dies, Khrushchev, Beria and Bulganin’ll tear me apart. Do you realize what it’s like living under the axe?”

  He callously abandoned his wife, Galina, taking their son Sasha to live with him at the House on the Embankment. She so longed to see Sasha that the nanny secretly met her so she could play with him. But Galina was too frightened to demand a flat or housekeeping from him. Vasily then married Marshal Timoshenko’s daughter Ekaterina, “a pretty Ukrainian.” His apartment was not grand enough for the scions of the Generalissimo and the Marshal so he demanded General Vlasik’s elegant villa on Gogolevsky. He flew back from Germany with a plane filled with “loot”: “golden ornaments, diamonds, emeralds, dozens of carpets, lots of ladies’ lingerie, a huge number of men’s suits, overcoats, fur coats, fur wraps, astrakhan” until Vasily’s house was “bursting with gold, German carpets and cut glass.” There was so much that his wife Timoshenka gradually sold it and pocketed the money. When his marriage to Timoshenka collapsed, he married a swimming star, the statuesque Kapitolina Vasileva, with whom he was happiest. Svetlana thought he was looking for his mother in his wives because he called her “mama” and she even wore her hair in a bun like Nadya.