Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  After Stalin’s death, Rada Khrushcheva asked what had happened to Kuznetsov: “He died terribly,” replied her father, “with a hook through his neck.”5

  This little massacre consolidated the power of Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev and Bulganin—the last men standing as Stalin entered his final years—but it was the swan song of Abakumov. That sensuous, flashy sadist would soon roll up his bloody carpet for good. Perhaps it was over-confidence that led him to close the Jewish Case in March 1950: no one was released. The tortures were so grievous that one victim counted two thousand separate blows on his buttocks and heels.

  Yet as that main case temporarily subsided, Stalin was orchestrating another anti-Semitic spasm from his holiday. Anti-Semitism now “grew like a tumour in Stalin’s mind,” said Khrushchev, yet he himself praised it in Pravda. Stalin called in the Ukrainian bosses for a dinner at which he briefed them on orchestrating a similar anti-Semitic campaign in Kiev. The hunt for “Zionist danger” was pursued through the government with thousands of Jews being sacked.293

  Stalin was particularly fascinated by a case against Jewish managers in the prestigious Stalin Automobile Plant that made his limousines: they had sent Mikhoels a telegram celebrating the foundation of Israel.

  “The good workers at the factory should be given clubs so they can beat the hell out of those Jews at the end of the working day,” Stalin told Khrushchev in February.

  “Well, have you received your orders?” Beria asked sardonically. Khrushchev, Malenkov and Beria, that inseparable threesome, summoned the Jewish ZiS managers to the Kremlin and accused them of “loss of vigilance” and complicity in an “anti-Soviet Jewish nationalistic sabotage group.” The terrified manager fainted. The three magnates had to resuscitate him with cold water. Stalin released the manager but two Jewish journalists, one a woman, who had written about the factory, were executed. His personal intervention made the difference between life and death. Another Jewish manager, Zaltsman, was saved because, during the war, he had sent Stalin a desk set shaped like a tank with the pens forming the guns.

  The Jews were not Stalin’s only target: his suspicions of Beria were constantly fanned by the ambitious Mgeladze, his boss in Abkhazia, who shrewdly revealed Beria’s crimes and vendettas of the late thirties. Stalin encouraged him and denounced Beria during their chats over dinner. Mgeladze’s was only one voice that informed Stalin of how corruptly the Mingrelians ran Georgia. Beria was a Mingrelian, so was Charkviani who had run it since 1938. Stalin ordered Abakumov to check the notoriously venal Georgia, and build a case against the Mingrelians, not forgetting Beria himself: “Go after the Big Mingrelian.”6

  On 18 November, towards the end of his holiday, Stalin agreed to arrest the first Jewish doctor. Professor Yakov Etinger, who had treated the leaders, was bugged talking too frankly about Stalin. Etinger was tortured about his “nationalistic” tendencies by one of Abakumov’s officers, Lieut.-Col. Mikhail Riumin, who forced him to implicate all the most distinguished Jewish doctors in Moscow but he somehow failed to please his boss. Abakumov ordered Riumin to desist but the officer tortured Etinger so enthusiastically that he died of “heart paralysis”—a euphemism for dying under torture. Riumin was in trouble—unless he could destroy Abakumov first.

  Abakumov was not guilty of idleness: Stalin was now redoubling the repression. Arrests intensified. In 1950 there were more slaves in the Gulags—2.6 million—than ever before. But Abakumov knew too much about the Leningrad and Jewish cases. Worse, Stalin sensed the foot-dragging of the MGB—and Abakumov himself. It was Yagoda all over again—and he needed a Yezhov.

  The brakes on the Jewish Case, the rumours of corruption, the whispers of Beria and Malenkov, possibly the strutting bumptiousness of the man himself, turned Stalin against Abakumov. There was no sudden break but when Stalin returned from holiday,294 just after his seventy-first birthday, on 22 December, he did not summon Abakumov. The weekly meetings ceased, as they had for Yagoda and Yezhov. Within the MGB snakepit, the ebbing of Stalin’s favour and the death of Etinger presented Riumin with an opportunity. “Little Mishka” or, as Stalin nicknamed him, “the Midget” or “Pygmy”—the “Shibsdik,” was the Vozhd’s second murderous dwarf.

  56

  The Midget and the Killer Doctors: Beat, Beat and Beat Again!

  Riumin, thirty-eight, plump and balding, stupid and vicious, was the latest in the succession of ambitious torturers who were only too willing to please and encourage Stalin by finding new Enemies and killing them for him. Unlike Yezhov, who had been so popular until he became an inquisitor, Riumin was already an enthusiastic killer even though he had passed eight school grades, qualifying as an accountant. As Malenkov showed, education was no bar to mass murder. He had his own problems. Dismissed for misappropriating money in 1937—and now in danger for killing the elderly Jewish doctor, the Midget decided to act. Perhaps to his own surprise, he lit the fuse of the Doctors’ Plot.

  On 2 July 1951, Riumin wrote to Stalin and accused Abakumov of deliberately killing Etinger to conceal a Jewish medical conspiracy to murder leaders such as the late Shcherbakov. This brought together Stalin’s fears of ageing, doctors and Jews. It was not Beria but Malenkov who sent Riumin’s letter to Stalin. This is confirmed by Malenkov’s assistant though he claimed that Riumin wrote the letter “for his own reasons.” The Doctors’ Plot worked against Beria and the old guard like Molotov but this swelling case could threaten Malenkov and Khrushchev too. So often at Stalin’s court, a case would start coincidentally, be encouraged by some magnate and then be spun back at them by Stalin like a bloody boomerang. Malenkov sometimes allied himself with Khrushchev, sometimes with Beria, but it was always Stalin making the big decisions. Riumin’s allegation of medical murder may have been prompted by Stalin himself—or it may have been the spark that inspired him to reach back to Zhdanov’s death and create a maze of conspiracies to provoke a Terror that would unite the country against America outside and its Jewish allies within.

  He now ordered Beria and Malenkov to examine the “Bad Situation at the MGB,” accusing Abakumov of corruption, ineptitude and debauchery. Around midnight on 5 July in the Little Corner, Stalin agreed to Malenkov’s suggestion to appoint Semyon Ignatiev, forty-seven, as the new boss. At 1 a.m., Abakumov was called in to hear of his downfall. At 1:40 a.m., Riumin arrived to receive his prizes: promotion to general and, later, Deputy Minister. Serving a short spell as a Chekist in 1920, Ignatiev was an eager, bespectacled CC bureaucrat who was a friend of Khrushchev and Malenkov. Indeed Khrushchev described Ignatiev as “mild and considerate” though the Jewish doctors would hardly have agreed with him. Beria again failed to regain control over the secret police. Henceforth Stalin himself ran the Doctors’ Plot through Ignatiev. Stalin sent Malenkov to tell the MGB that he wanted to find a “grand intelligence network of the U.S.A.” linked to “Zionists.”

  The next day, 12 July, Abakumov was arrested. In the tradition of fallen secret policemen, his corruption was lovingly recorded: 3,000 metres of expensive cloth, clothes, sets of china, crystal vases—“enough for a shop”—were found in his homes. In order to build his flats Abakumov removed sixteen families and spent a million roubles to make a “palace” using two hundred workers, six engineers and the entire MGB Construction Department. Yet the downfall of monsters also destroyed the innocent: Abakumov’s young wife, Antonina Smirnova, with whom he had a two-month-old son, had received 70,000 roubles’ worth of presents, including an antique Viennese pram. So she was arrested: the destiny of the girl and the baby are unknown.295

  Abakumov, no longer a Minister but just a number, Object 15, spent three months shackled in the refrigerator cell, being viciously interrogated by his nemesis, the Midget: “Dear LP,” he wrote pitifully to Beria, “I feel so terrible . . . You’re the closest man to me, and I wait for you to ask me back . . . You will need me in the future.”

  Abakumov had been destroyed for failing to push the Jewish Case. Ignatiev and the egregious “Midget” Riumi
n set about torturing the Jewish officials of the JAFC and the doctors to “substantiate the evidence of espionage and nationalistic activity.”1

  The impresario of this theatre of plots and pain was now ageing fast. He sometimes became so giddy that he fell over in his Kremlin apartment. The bodyguards had to keep a close eye on him because “he didn’t look after himself.” He hardly bothered to read all his papers. Kuntsevo was strewn with unopened boxes. He still corrected Bulganin’s speeches like a schoolmaster but then forgot Bulganin’s name in front of the rest of the Politburo: “Look, what’s your name?”

  “Bulganin.”

  “Right yes . . . that’s what I meant to say.”

  Riven by arthritis, diminished by raging arteriosclerosis, dazed by fainting spells, embarrassed by failing memory, tormented by sore gums and false teeth, unpredictable, paranoid and angry, Stalin left on 10 August for his last and longest holiday. “Cursed old age has caught up with me,” he muttered. He was even more restless than usual, travelling from Gagra to New Athos, Tsaltubo to Borzhomi and back. At Lake Ritsa, the woods, lakeside and paths were peppered with strange green metal boxes, containing special telephones so Stalin could call for help if taken ill on a stroll.

  But dizzy spells were not going to stop him cleansing his entourage: “I, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov—we’re all old . . . we must fill . . . the Politburo with younger . . . cadres,” he ominously told Mgeladze. Yet his paranoia gave him no rest: “I’m finished,” he told Mikoyan and Khrushchev who, like all the magnates, were on holiday nearby so they could visit Stalin twice a week. “I don’t even trust myself.”

  At dinner, he surveyed his courtiers and “puffing out his chest like a turkey,” he embarked on that favourite but lethal subject—his successor. It could not be Beria because he “wasn’t Russian,” nor Kaganovich, a Jew. Voroshilov was too old. He did not even mention Mikoyan (an Armenian) or Molotov. It could not be Khrushchev because he was a “country boy” and Russia needed a leader from the intelligentsia. Then he named Bulganin, the very man whose name he tended to forget, as his successor as Premier. None were ideologically qualified to lead the Party but he had not mentioned Malenkov who perhaps took this as an encouraging sign. He ordered books and started frantically studying.

  “Well, Comrade Stalin requires me to study political science.” Malanya, caught reading Adam Smith, asked a colleague, “How long will it take to master?”

  The magnates were convinced that Stalin was becoming senile but actually he was never more dangerous, determined and in control. He lashed out in every direction, at his comrades, Jews, Mingrelians, even banana importers. The story of the bananas sums up the governing style of the ageing Stalin.

  Vlasik learned a shipment of bananas had just arrived and eager to soothe the bad teeth of the Master, he bought some for Stalin. At dinner at Coldstream with all the magnates, Vlasik proudly presented the bananas. Stalin peeled one and found it was not ripe. He tried two more. They too were not ripe. “Have you tried the bananas?” he asked his guests. Stalin summoned Vlasik: “Where did you get these bananas?” Vlasik tried to explain but Stalin shouted: “These crooks take bribes and rob the country. What was the name of the banana ship?”

  “I don’t know,” said Vlasik, “I didn’t take an interest . . .”

  “Take an interest! I’ll put you on trial with the rest of them!” bellowed Stalin. Poskrebyshev rushed off to find out the name of the ship and order arrests. Malenkov pulled out his notebook and took notes. Stalin ordered Mikoyan to sack the new Trade Minister. But Beria was eager to beat Mikoyan to the banana, as it were.

  The dinner ended at 5 a.m. At 6 a.m., Stalin called Beria to tell him to sack the Minister. When Mikoyan called Moscow just after 6 a.m., he found that Beria had already reprimanded the unfortunate. A few days later, Mikoyan arrived to say goodbye and Stalin was still talking about those bananas. The Minister was sacked. Charkviani wrote that this was typical of Stalin’s “eruptions leading to irrelevant decisions.” Stalin, concluded Mikoyan drily, “was simply very fond of bananas.”2

  Stalin’s limbs ached but when he took the waters at Tsaltubo, the weather was too hot. He decided to take the waters at Borzhomi and visit a house with special memories. He had stayed at the Likani Palace, a neo-Gothic mansion owned by Grand Duke Michael, Nicholas II’s brother, overlooking the Kura River, with Nadya in happier times. It had become a museum and was barely habitable, without bedrooms, which suited Stalin. It suited his magnates less: he ordered Khrushchev and Mikoyan to stay too. They rushed over from Sochi and Sukhumi but, without beds, they had to camp together, sharing a room like Boy Scouts.

  Stalin ate every day at a table laid under a tree by the Kura in idyllic lush countryside. When he went for walks, he cursed at the bodyguards, bumping into them by suddenly changing direction. He decided to visit Bakuriani but the locals mobbed his car, placing carpets and banqueting tables across the road. The supreme curmudgeon had to dismount and join his overexcited fans for a Georgian feast. “They open their mouths and yell like dunderheads!” he muttered, face twitching. He never made it to Bakuriani and returned to Abkhazia.

  At the Palace, where Nadya had rested after Vasily’s birth, Stalin brooded on his family. Vasily, now pitifully ill with alcoholism, visited. “His health’s so poor, his stomach’s sick, he can’t even eat,” Stalin confided in Charkviani.

  Like a Western millionaire booking his playboy son into the Betty Ford Clinic, Stalin intervened to enrol Vasily in a drying-out programme but here too he searched for a culprit and found one in the banana procurer: “Vlasik and his friends did it, they turned his drinking into an addiction!” Stalin had been cursing Vlasik’s corruption for years. A denunciation letter and Malenkov’s investigation into MGB venality revealed Vlasik’s orgies and shenanigans. Stalin was upset but felt mired in corruption. He finally sacked his most devoted retainer.296

  Svetlana’s marriage to Yury was over after just two years. In a letter to her father, she called him a “heartless bookworm” and an “iceberg.” Stalin told Mgeladze that Svetlana wore the trousers:

  “Yury Zhdanov’s not the head of that family—he can’t insist on anything. He doesn’t listen to her nor she to him. The husband should run a family . . . that’s the main thing.” But Yury himself would never dare ask Stalin for a divorce so Svetlana came to see him instead.

  “I know what you want to say,” he said. “You’ve decided to divorce him.”

  “Father,” Svetlana answered in a begging tone. Charkviani, who was present was embarrassed and excused himself but Stalin insisted he stay.

  “So why’re you divorcing him?” Stalin asked.

  “I can’t live with my mother-in-law. She’s impossible!”

  “What does your husband say?”

  “He supports his mother!”

  Stalin sighed: “If you’ve decided to divorce him, I can’t change your mind, but your behaviour isn’t acceptable.” She blushed and left, walking out of the Zhdanov family and moving into a flat in the House on the Embankment with her two children.

  “Who knows what next?” muttered Stalin.

  “Stalin wasn’t too happy when it ended,” admits Yury, but he was not too surprised either. He did not hold it against Yury but invited him to stay at Lake Ritsa where they chatted half the night about Stalin’s visit to London in 1907. When they naturally talked about the campaign against cosmopolitanism, Zhdanov, who had played his own role in hunting out Jewish scientists, asked Stalin if he thought it was “assuming a lopsided national character,” meaning it was aimed too much against the Jews.

  “Cosmopolitanism’s a widespread phenomenon,” replied Stalin. When he finally got up to go to bed in the early hours, he cited a Jewess he admired: “Maria Kaganovich—there’s a real Bolshevik! One should pay attention to social position, not national condition!” and he staggered off to sleep. In the morning the table was laid on the bank of Lake Ritsa and Yury watched Stalin peruse Pravda. “What are they writing
about?” he snarled, reading out, “Long live Comrade Stalin, leader of all nations!”— and he tossed it away in disgust.

  After entertaining other old friends, who complained that the Mingrelians were notoriously corrupt, Stalin headed back to New Athos and then dared Mgeladze to be there within seventeen minutes. The ambitious Abkhazian boss, who sensed his hours of chatting with the old man were about to bear fruit, made it in fifteen and finally convinced Stalin that Charkviani was running “a bordello!”

  He furiously summoned the Georgian MGB boss, the crude, barrel-chested Rukhadze. “The Mingrelians are totally unreliable,” said Stalin, who in old age embraced the parochial hatreds of different regions of Georgia. Thousands of Mingrelians were arrested but Stalin wanted to destroy Beria. Perhaps he suspected that Lavrenti was no Marxist: “He’s become very pretentious . . . he’s not how he used to be . . . Comrades who dine with him say he’s utterly bourgeois.”

  Stalin was “afraid of Beria,” thought Khrushchev, “and would have been glad to get rid of him but didn’t know how to do it.” Stalin himself confirmed this, sensing that Beria was winning support: “Beria’s so wily and tricksy. He’s become so trusted by the Politburo that they defend him. They don’t realize he’s pulled the wool over their eyes. For example— Vyacheslav [Molotov] and Lazar [Kaganovich]. I think Beria has his eye on a future goal. But he’s limited. In his time, he did great work but as for now . . . I’m not sure he wouldn’t misuse his power.” Then Stalin remembered his closest allies: “Zhdanov and Kirov thought poorly of him but . . . we liked Beria for his modesty and efficiency. Later he lost these qualities. He’s just a policeman.”

  Ignatiev sent sixty MGB interrogators and a torture specialist carrying a special medical case filled with his instruments, down to Tiflis. Stalin phoned Charkviani, with whom he had spent hours discussing literature and family, and without saying hello, threatened: