Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Yury did not have to stay, but another young man was less fortunate and endured nine days before he managed to escape. That October, Oleg Troyanovsky, a Foreign Ministry interpreter of twenty-six, was sent down to Gagra to interpret for Stalin at a meeting with some British Labour MPs.278

  Handsome, brown-haired and erudite, Troyanovsky was another child of the élite. When Stalin first met young Troyanovsky, he liked him so much that he put on the Red Indian accent from Last of the Mohicans : “Send my regards to pale-faced brother from leader of redskins!” When Stalin had seen off the British MPs, he said to Troyanovsky: “Why don’t you stay on and live with us for a while. We’ll get you drunk and then we’ll see what sort of person you are.”

  This was so unexpected and alarming that Troyanovsky stammered that surely it would be “a burden to Comrade Stalin,” but he insisted. Troyanovsky was understandably uneasy but Stalin summoned him to play billiards a few times, a game he played extremely well without even seeming to aim at the ball. They mainly met at dinner where they were sometimes joined by Poskrebyshev or Politburo members. The host personally served Troyanovsky. The conversation was “never awkward, no silences,” even though Troyanovsky was shrewd enough to ask no questions and proffer few opinions. Stalin did the talking, reminiscing about his stay with Oleg’s father in Vienna in 1913, his “first time with a Western-style family.” Otherwise Stalin just told him to rest but “it was hardly possible to describe anything to do with Stalin as restful.”

  Troyanovsky, like every other guest, fretted about how to escape without offending Stalin. After nine nights, he plucked up the courage to ask Stalin if he could leave. Stalin seemed surprised until Troyanovsky explained that he was returning to Moscow to become a Party member.

  “An important event,” said Stalin. “Good luck.” Presenting Troyanovsky with a basket of fruit, there was an awkward but telling moment as he saw him off: “It’s probably boring for you here. I’ve got used to loneliness. I got accustomed to it in prison.”3

  On his return to Moscow on 21 November, this genial old host ordered Abakumov to murder the Yiddish actor, Mikhoels. Nine days later, he supported the UN vote for the creation of Israel.

  52

  Two Strange Deaths: The Yiddish Actor and the Heir Apparent

  The Stalin Prize Committee sent Mikhoels to Minsk to judge plays at Belorussian theatres. When this was reported to Stalin, he verbally ordered Abakumov to murder Mikhoels on the spot, specifying some of the details with Malenkov present. Abakumov gave the task to his deputy, and the Minsk MGB boss, invoking the Instantsiya. Abakumov’s plan was to “invite Mikhoels to visit some acquaintances in the evening, provide him with a car . . . bring him to the vicinity of [Belorussian MGB boss] Tsanava’s dacha and kill him there; then take the corpse to a deserted street, place it across the road leading to the hotel and have a truck run over it . . .” The plan has all the hallmarks of the clumsy, gangsterish games that Stalin used to devise with Beria to liquidate those too celebrated to be arrested. Tsanava passed the orders down the line, always dropping the magic word—Instantsiya.

  On 12 January, Mikhoels and his friend Vladimir Golubov-Potapov, a theatre critic and MGB agent, spent the day meeting actors, then dined at their hotel. At 8 p.m. they left the hotel to meet Golubov’s “friend.” Presumably the MGB car took them to Tsanava’s dacha where Mikhoels was probably injected with poison to stun him, another job for the MGB’s doctors. Perhaps he fought back. This exuberant artist, the last connection with the intellectual brilliance of Mandelstam and Babel, loved life and must have struggled. He was smashed on the temple with a blunt object, and shot too. Golubov, the duplicitous bystander, was killed as well. The bodies were then driven into town, run over with a truck and left in the snow.279

  Stalin was informed of the killings probably before the bodies had been dumped in the street, and just as Svetlana was arriving to visit him at Kuntsevo. Stalin was on the phone, most likely to Tsanava: “Someone was reporting to him and he listened. Then to sum up, he said, ‘Well, a car accident.’ I remember his intonation very well—it was not a question, it was a confirmation . . . He was not asking, he was proposing it, the car accident.” When he had put down the phone, he kissed Svetlana and said, “Mikhoels was killed in a car accident.”

  At seven the next morning, two bodies were found sticking out of the snow. Mikhoels’s body was returned to Moscow and delivered to the laboratory of Professor Boris Zbarsky, the ( Jewish) biochemist in charge of Lenin’s mummy: noticing the damaged head and the bullet hole, he was ordered to prepare the victim of the “road accident” for the lying-in-state in the Jewish Theatre, where no one was fooled by his “broken face” and “mutilated features made up with greasepaint.”

  Mikhoels was an artistic hero to some of Stalin’s courtiers as well as to the public: on the 15th, the night before the funeral, Polina Molotova, who had rediscovered her Jewish roots during the war, quietly attended the lying-in-state and muttered, “It was murder.” After the funeral, Yulia Kaganovich, the niece of Lazar and daughter of Mikhail who had committed suicide in 1941, arrived at the Mikhoels’ and led his daughter into the bathroom. Here, with taps running, she whispered: “Uncle sends his regards,” adding an order from the anxious Kaganovich: “He told me to tell you—never ask anyone about anything.” The Jewish Theatre was renamed for Mikhoels; a murder investigation was opened. The Jewish Committee continued, and Stalin would be the first to recognize Israel.

  However, out of the public eye, Mikhoels’ murderer, Tsanava, received the Order of Lenin “for exemplary execution of a special assignment from the government.” Zhenya Alliluyeva was sentenced to ten years, her daughter Kira to five years, “for supplying information about the personal life of [Stalin’s] family to the American Embassy.” Anna Redens also got five years. They were placed in solitary confinement.280

  The MGB now started to build a case against Deputy Foreign Minister Solomon Lozovsky and other prominent Jews: Polina Molotova was quietly sacked from her job. Stalin openly joked about his own antiSemitism, teasing Djilas about Jews in the Yugoslav leadership:

  “You too are an anti-Semite, you too . . .”1

  Zhdanov, despite his “red puffy face and lively movements,” recovered his heartiness and power: “I might die at any moment and I might live a very long time,” he told Djilas. At dinners, he tried to resist alcohol and ate nothing but a plate of clear soup.

  For a sick man, the next few months could hardly have been less restful: Stalin now encountered his first real opposition for almost twenty years. Marshal Tito was no vassal. His Partisans had fought valiantly against the Germans and not depended on the Red Army to liberate them. Now, the Yugoslavs bitterly denounced Zhdanov’s “dictatorial behaviour” at the Cominform conference. When Stalin read this, he could not believe the impertinence of it, scrawling in brown crayon: “Very queer information!”

  Stalin had agreed to leave Greece to the West, reserving the right to choose when and where to confront America. Tito disregarded his orders and started to supply the Greek Communists. Stalin was determined to test American resolve in Berlin, not in some obscure Balkan village. The final straw was the planned Balkan federation agreed between the Bulgarian leader, (ex-Comintern chief) Dmitrov, and Tito, without Stalin’s permission. As the row heated up, Tito sent his comrades, Milovan Djilas and Edvard Kardelj, to negotiate with Stalin. At grisly Kuntsevo dinners, Stalin, Zhdanov and Beria tried to overawe Yugoslavia with Soviet supremacy. Djilas was fascinated but defiant. So, on 28 January, Pravda denounced Dmitrov’s plan.

  On 10 February, Stalin summoned the Yugoslavs and Bulgarians to the Little Corner to humiliate them, as if they were impudent Politburo members. Instead of opposing the Bulgarian–Yugoslav plan, he proposed a collage of little federations, linking countries that already hated each other. Stalin was “glowering and doodling ceaselessly.”

  “When I say no it means no!” said Stalin who instead proposed that Yugoslavia swallow Albania, ma
king gobbling gestures with his fingers and gulping sounds with his lips. The scowling threesome—Stalin, Zhdanov and Molotov—only hardened Tito’s resistance.

  Stalin and Molotov despatched an eight-page letter implying that Tito was guilty of that heinous sin—Trotskyism. “We think Trotsky’s political career is sufficiently instructive,” they wrote ominously but the Yugoslavs did not care. On 12 April, they rejected the letter. Stalin decided to crush Tito.

  “I’ll shake my little finger,” he ranted at Khrushchev, “and there’ll be no more Tito!” But Tito proved a tougher nut than Trotsky or Bukharin.2

  At Kuntsevo dinners, Zhdanov, the heir apparent but increasingly a frail alcoholic with a sick heart, “sometimes lost the willpower to control himself” and reached for the drink. Then Stalin “shouted at him to stop drinking,” one of the rare moments he tried to restrain the boozing, a sign of Zhdanov’s special place. But at other times, the pasty-faced, sanctimonious Zhdanov, sitting prissily and soberly while Stalin swore at Tito and smirked at scatological jokes, outraged him: “Look at him sitting there like Christ as if nothing was any concern to him! There—looking at me now as if he were Christ!”

  Zhdanov blanched, his face covered with beads of perspiration. Svetlana, who was present, gave him a glass of water but this was only a routine eruption of Stalin’s blazing temper that usually passed as suddenly as it struck. Nonetheless, Stalin was increasingly irritated by Zhdanov’s over-familiar smugness and independence of mind. Beria and Malenkov were aided in their vengefulness from a surprising quarter.

  Chosen by Stalin, growing closer to Svetlana and, at twenty-eight, Head of the CC Science Department, Yury Zhdanov was cock of the walk. He took his science as seriously as his father took culture. Yury resented the absurd dominance of Trofim Lysenko in the field of genetics: the scientific charlatan had used Stalin’s backing during the Terror to purge the genetics establishment of genuine scientists.

  “Yury, don’t tangle with Lysenko,” Zhdanov jokingly warned his son. “He’ll cross you with a cucumber.” But Zhdanov may have been too ill to stop him.

  On 10 April, 1948, young Zhdanov attacked both Lysenko’s so-called creative Darwinism and his suppression of scientists and their ideas, in a speech at the Moscow Polytechnic. Lysenko listened to the lecture through a speaker in a nearby office. This experienced courtier appealed to Stalin, attacking Yury’s impudence in speaking for the Party “in his own name.” Lysenko copied the letter to Malenkov who supported him. Wheels were turning. Malenkov sent the lecture to Stalin who now believed himself the “Coryphaeus”—the “choirmaster”—of science. He read Yury’s lecture with mounting disdain: “Ha-ha-ha!” he scribbled angrily. “Nonsense!” and “Get out!”

  The impertinent puppy had contradicted Stalin’s views on heredity and evolution, and usurped his personal authority. When Yury claimed that these were his own personal views, Stalin exclaimed: “Aha!” and forwarded his comments to a delighted Malenkov.

  Frustrated by Yugoslav resistance, tension in Berlin, and Zionist intrigues, Stalin had decided this was the moment to challenge America in Europe. He demanded Party discipline; Yury had flouted it. In an Olympian flash that changed Soviet science and politics, Coryphaeus intervened.

  On 10 June, Stalin held one of his set-piece humiliation sessions in the Little Corner. Andrei Zhdanov humbly took notes at the front, his son lurked at the back while Stalin, pacing, “pipe in hand and puffing frequently,” muttered: “How did anyone dare insult Comrade Lysenko?” Zhdanov miserably noted Stalin’s words in his exercise book: “Report is wrong. ZHDANOV HAS BEEN MISTAKEN.” Then Stalin stopped and asked: “Who authorized it?”

  His gaze chilled the room. “There was the silence of the grave,” wrote Shepilov, a Zhdanov protégé. Everyone looked down. Shepilov stood up to admit: “The decision was mine, Comrade Stalin.”

  Stalin walked up to him and stared into his eyes. “I can honestly say,” recalled Shepilov, “I never saw such a look . . . His eyes seemed to possess some incredible force. Their yellow pupils transfixed me like . . . a cobra coiled to strike.” Stalin “did not blink for what seemed eternity.” Then he demanded: “Why did you do it?”

  Shepilov tried to explain but Stalin interrupted: “We’ll set up a committee to clarify all the facts. The guilty must be punished. Not Yury Zhdanov, he’s still young,” but he pointed his pipe at “the Pianist”: “It’s necessary to punish the fathers.” Then, in a terrible silence, slowly pacing, he listed the members of the committee—Malenkov . . . but no Zhdanovs! Stalin deliberately waited until the end. Did this mean the Zhdanovshchina was over? “After long thought, Stalin uttered, ‘And Zhdanov,’ leaving a long silence before adding, ‘Senior.’ ”

  Yury wrote an apology to Stalin, citing his own “inexperience”: “I unquestionably committed a whole series of grave mistakes.” Malenkov masterfully manipulated the unintentional impudence of Zhdanov junior to pull himself back into the centre: the apology was published in Pravda . But Stalin himself had engineered Zhdanov’s eclipse. The humiliation worsened Zhdanov’s health: he must have wished he had emulated the Berias and Malenkovs who kept their children far from politics.3

  On 19 June, an exhausted Zhdanov, accompanied by his rival Malenkov, arrived at the second Cominform meeting in Bucharest to preside over the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the fold. “We possess information,” Zhdanov declared absurdly, “that Tito is an Imperialist spy.” The Yugoslavs were excommunicated.

  On 24 June, Stalin imposed the Berlin Blockade, challenging the Western Allies and hoping to force them out by closing land supplies to their zone deep in Soviet East Germany. Both these challenges could only accelerate the vicious campaign against Jews in Moscow and the venomous fight for Stalin’s succession. It is usually claimed that Zhdanov had supported the Yugoslavs and therefore was blamed for the rift. Zhdanov and Voznesensky had indeed known the Yugoslavs well since 1945 but they not only supported Stalin’s stance but accelerated it by bringing Tito’s antics to his notice.

  The Yugoslav schism was the unnecessary result of Stalin’s own obstinacy. While the country worshipped Stalin the God, familiarity bred contempt. By 1948, Djilas believed Stalin was “showing conspicuous signs of senility,” comparing everything to distant memories of his childhood or Siberian exiles: “Yes I remember the same things . . .” then “laughing at inanities and shallow jokes.” His own men observed his intellectual decline and dangerous unpredictability: “old and addled, we started to lose respect for him,” said Khrushchev. Beria too had gone through the same “evolution”—starting with zealous worship and ending with disillusion. But most of the magnates, particularly Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich and Khrushchev, remained fanatical believers in Marxism-Leninism, while virtually all of them, including Malenkov who saw himself as a civil servant chinovnik, believed Stalin was still on the side of history, for all his faults.4

  In June, Zhdanov, back from Bucharest, suffered another cardiac crisis and a minor stroke, resulting in breathing difficulties and paralysis of the right side. “I’ve been told to have medical care and rest,” he told a protégé. “I don’t think I’ll be away for long.” On 1 July, Stalin replaced Zhdanov with his nemesis, Malenkov, as Second Secretary. He was a useful scapegoat but, in Stalin’s orbit, there was no need to destroy Zhdanov to promote Malenkov: it suited Stalin to run them in parallel. Zhdanov fainted on his way back from Kuntsevo: now, desperately ill, he could no longer perform his duties. Yury explains that his father “wasn’t dismissed— he simply fell ill and couldn’t defend his interests,” which is confirmed by the doctors: “Comrade Zhdanov needs two months rest, one in bed,” Professor Yegorov told Stalin in a Top Secret report on which Stalin wrote: “Where vacation? Where treatment?”

  Stalin, recalls Yury, “became worried. Father’s illness caused a change in the balance of power.” Mikoyan confirmed this. Indeed Zhdanov’s allies, Voznesensky and Kuznetsov, remained ascendant. Yury kept his job.

  Stalin sent his ow
n doctors to supervise Zhdanov who was moved to a sanatorium at Valdai, near Novgorod. Nonetheless, Zhdanov felt power slipping through his sclerotic fingers: when, on 23 July, Shepilov called to update him on Malenkov’s return, Zhdanov shouted into the phone. That night, he had a heart attack. Stalin sent his deputy Voznesensky and his own physician Vinogradov to visit the patient.

  Zhdanov’s obvious symptoms of arteriosclerosis and heart failure were misdiagnosed. Instead of daily cardiograms and total rest, he was prescribed exercise and harmful massages. On 29 August, he had another severe attack. Once again Stalin sent Vinogradov and ordered Voznesensky and Kuznetsov to check the treatment. Before the politicians arrived, a row broke out over the patient. Dr. Lydia Timashuk, the cardiographer, diagnosed a “myocardial infarction” (a heart attack), and she was almost certainly right, but the distinguished professors made her rewrite her report to specify a much vaguer “dysfunction due to arteriosclerosis and hypertension” in a typical piece of bureaucratic infighting. The doctors poohpoohed her grave diagnosis and prescribed walking in the park. Hence, Zhdanov suffered another heart attack.

  Timashuk denounced her superiors and had Zhdanov’s chief bodyguard deliver the letter to General Vlasik to give personally to Stalin. When nothing happened, Timashuk, an MGB agent, wrote to the secret police. Abakumov forwarded the letter to Stalin that same day. Stalin signed it, wrote “Into the archive,” but did nothing. But he was “very anxious and sent back Voznesensky to check on Father,” says Yury who was already there.

  On the 31st, Stalin’s fallen favourite got out of bed to visit the lavatory and died of a massive coronary. On Poskrebyshev’s orders, the post-mortem was carried out in an ill-lit, shoddy bathroom in Kuznetsov’s presence. The professors were terrified that their misdiagnosis and cover-up would be exposed so they sacked and denounced Timashuk who then wrote more damning letters to Stalin and Kuznetsov, MGB curator. But this time, Vlasik did not deliver the letter and Kuznetsov ignored his.