by Arno Baker
“Shall we offer some wine to Nikita…” Beria asked jovially in Georgian to Stalin. He laughed and Stalin laughed with him.
“Yes, give the pig a drink it could well be his last!
They both laughed hysterically as Khrushchev and Voroshilov approached.
“Drink Comrades, Beria has brought some new wine from down south! It‘s excellent this year and perhaps he‘ll provide each one of you with a bottle of your own! But let the music start!”
The music suddenly became more animated as the dictator spoke and a team of energetic dancers took over the floor. Beria who could barely contain himself grabbed one of the women who was dancing by the arm and drew her toward his wide girth. But then he caught Stalin’s yellow stare glaring at him glass in hand. Beria let the dancer go but promised himself a private meeting later on. Then the fat boy, Georgy Malenkov came over and took a chair next to Stalin who smoked his pipe quietly not even looking at him as he whispered in his ear.
“Comrade Stalin, I wish to discuss the matter of the Rosenberg case and how we should proceed.”
Stalin looked annoyed and uninterested. His thoughts were far removed from whatever was going on at Sing Sing as the inexorable conclusion was drawing closer.
“Well…? If you have any bright ideas make a recommendation in writing. I have expressed my opinion a long time ago. Now we must make the most of a situation we can no longer control. I have ordered that if and when they are executed several avenues and squares be named after them in the satellite countries: Budapest, Warsaw, Prague...Rest assured that what happens to those Jews is of no interest to us unless we can use it successfully for our campaign to soften up the west or shame them into acquiescence.”
Malenkov’s flabby body shook with approval as he nodded at Stalin.
“Absolutely Iosif Vissarionovich, we should let things take their course and perhaps the Americans will actually do us a favor by executing them quickly, and turning them into martyrs! I couldn‘t agree with you more and those avenues and squares are ready for the name plates to be switched. We have alerted each of the mayors to get the signs ready without delay since it seems almost certain that the Americans will send the couple to the electric chair. That would be an excellent outcome!”
“Yes, definitely the best possible result for us, it will take the heat off our anti-Semitic image! Then we can say ‘Look at those sadistic American anti-Semites executing two poor Jews who were truly innocent!’ I look forward to your report Georgy. This may be a windfall for us.”
Stalin took another sip of dark red vodka as Beria disappeared with one of the bottles only to return seconds later with a broad winning smile. He approached Stalin as he strolled over bottle in hand.
“Next week, then?” he asked the dictator.
“Yes, Monday or Tuesday latest. And make sure Molotov’s wife is part of the batch.”
“Of course! Excellent! We shall proceed as ordered.”
Once Stalin had reached the decision to execute three quarters of the Presidium members he felt suddenly relaxed and ordered that music be played louder and that the buffet be opened for all the guests. Beria held up the open bottle of vodka and Stalin looked at it suspiciously but then recognizing it as one of the two bottles he had seen before simply offered up his glass. Beria smiled and poured. Stalin drank and watched Khrushchev who looked a bit shy and perhaps even frightened.
“Nikita, you are too fat, you always look like a small pig, can‘t you moderate your repulsive eating habits, it may shorten your life, you know? But once a pig, always a pig!”
He laughed and winked at Beria. The body language and the winking was not lost on fat little Nikita.
When they left late that night Beria ordered his driver to take him to his private apartment where he made a phone call on the secure line he had installed after Abakumov’s demise. Twenty minutes later a big Chaika pulled up and three men in uniform entered the building: Sudoplatov, Merkulov and a bodyguard posted in front of the car until Beria appeared with his acolytes.
They drove the short distance into the courtyard of the Lubyanka where Beria went straight to the basement and demanded to see the Mingrelian generals who were being kept in solitary cells in the so-called ‘political isolator,’ a euphemism for death row. Beria looked at each man but he didn‘t ask that any of the cells be open; instead he requested that Dr. Maximilishvili be taken out and placed in his personal custody. The assistant warden didn’t dare object to such an order. Rumors were already circulating that something was up at Kuntsevo, that a war council was in session, that suddenly there could be war with America (a favorite bugaboo of the ‘organs’) because of a breakdown of the armistice talks in Korea. There were further rumors that Eisenhower was going to appoint MacArthur as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and that nuclear war would immediately follow.
The assistant warden reappeared with a strikingly beautiful woman in her mid-thirties with typically Georgian dark features and black curly hair. Dr. Vardo Mikhailovna Maximilishvili was a medical student at Tbilisi when she met Beria in the early 1930s and became one of his many lovers. When Beria was called by Stalin to work in Moscow he eventually arranged for Vardo to follow him and had her marry an NKVD officer as a cover for their continued relationship. The young doctor, who was also extremely intelligent, was trained as an intelligence operative by the wife of Pavel Sudoplatov, himself a longtime member of Beria‘s inner circle in the MVD and the organizer of the liquidations of many dissidents such as Leon Trotsky among others. But in 1952 Vardo was arrested on a direct order from Stalin and accused of being a member of a subversive organization inside the Mingrelian officer‘s plot. She was to be put to death any day by the paranoid dictator.
Her eyes smiled when she saw Lavrenti Beria who escorted her flanked by Pavel Sudoplatov to the waiting car. The warden also looked satisfied considering himself lucky that no harm had come to the beautiful Vardo while she was in his care.
Beria was living up to his reputation as a fierce womanizer even though everyone knew that Stalin didn’t approve the excesses and incessant escapades of his chief of police. They entered the apartment building with Beria’s bodyguard while Sudoplatov and Merkulov went to a safe house nearby while Yuri, the driver, was ordered to stay near a telephone in case of emergency. His orders were that Comrade Beria wouldn’t need him until morning but that he should remain alert and expect a call at any time. The last point sounded redundant since Beria always assumed that his drivers would be on call, and ready to respond on aminute’s notice. Why the insistence this time? Months later, long after Beria’s demise, the driver concluded that his boss fully “expected” that an emergency phone call would be coming and that they must rush back to the dacha. But at the time the driver didn‘t find the situation suspicious.
The call came at 6:32 am and the minister was in the company of Vardo as the car pulled up with Sudoplatov sitting next to the driver. Beria was as always in civilian clothes. Sudoplatov told Yuri to rush to Kuntsevo at full speed. The center lane reserved for top officials was empty and the Chaika covered the distance in record time. As he looked in the rear view mirror from time to time the driver wasn’t surprised to see how Beria and the woman were holding hands and whispering to one another as they kissed. On the way there were columns of MVD troop trucks with soldiers in battle dress moving slowly toward Kuntsevo. At Stalin’s palatial dacha there was unusual commotion outside with several more troop carriers and more uniformed MVD guards surrounding the grounds. Everyone at the entrance and inside looked grim and worried.
Beria and Vardo rushed in while Sudoplatov told the driver to stay put and be ready to speed back at a minute’s notice. It was only many years later that Yuri heard what happened inside the palatial dacha from one of the old Georgian valets whose life was miraculously spared.
Stalin suffered a stroke in the wee hours of the night as he was trying to open the second door of a double door system and reach the hallway outside his apartment. He had c
ollapsed on the floor of the small vestibule separating his bedroom door from the door to the corridor. Apparently the seizure had been rather mild but strong enough to prevent him from getting back on his feet and call for help. It may have been as early as 2 a.m. The red light bulb indicating a security breach due to an open door to the dictator‘s apartment was flashing on the main surveillance console.
Yet it took the guards over 40 minutes to react and inspect the location. They all were convinced it could only be a malfunction of the system since no one dared imagine that anything could happen to Stalin. As the young guards on duty for the second shift arrived and finally decided to open the double doors they noticed much to their horror that Stalin had urinated all over his pants and on the carpet on the floor and that he appeared helpless and babbling incomprehensible words in a state of uncontrollable dementia.
The guards were too terrified to do anything so they just stood guard and left him unattended exactly where he was for the entire thirty minutes it took for Beria to arrive with Vardo and Sudoplatov.
Beria introduced her as a doctor from the Tblisi Institute of Rare Diseases and she directed the guards to carefully lift the body and move it to the sofa in the bedroom. Stalin, who was barely semi conscious, was slipping in and out of a coma, and kept on shaking his head but was unable to speak. His eyes rolled wildly as he examined the people surrounding him. The guards obeyed the doctor who then proceeded to administer an injection “for the heart” into the dictator’s arm. Within seconds Stalin lost consciousness completely having received a lethal dose of a sophisticated poison compound that acted gradually by crippling the nervous system. Less than one hour later the other doctors summoned by Beria arrived among them the heart specialist P.E. Lukomsky. All the doctors became terrified as soon as they saw Stalin‘s appearance. Beria terrorized them even more when he began asking out loud: “Do you guarantee Comrade Stalin’s life?” at that point the dictator’s daughter Svetlana arrived and remembered later,
“There was only one person who was behaving almost obscenely. That was Beria . . . He was trying so hard, at this moment of crisis, to strike the right balance, to be cunning yet not too cunning…”
The rest of the Presidium was soon present and Dr. Vardo was seen whispering to Beria in a corner while he just nodded without saying a word. Stalin had a few more convulsive spasms opening his eyes then falling back into a coma and even frothing from the mouth. The Presidium members were also frightened and had trouble looking at the contorted face of their fallen master. They took turns standing guard: Malenkov, Khrushchev, Mikoyan, Kaganovich…and Beria, naturally. But hours later after several more spasms when a team of doctors proved unable to revive Stalin, he was finally pronounced dead.
It was decided that the news would be withheld until the Presidium could convene and decide how to proceed under the circumstances. The death of the supreme leader was never even contemplated as a possibility so no succession mechanism existed within the Presidium. As soon as all six doctors confirmed that Stalin was dead, Beria and the mysterious Vardo quickly left by car to return to Moscow. The Stalin era had passed and the fastest operator would pick up the spoils, or so Beria thought.
The secret police chief went directly to the ministry and ordered several units to assemble in the courtyard with full gear and be ready to move out. Then he marched into the Kremlin and went straight up to Stalin’s office where he placed the entire staff under arrest. Two dozen soldiers were detailed to assemble all the documents they could find in Stalin’s private office and if necessary force the staff to produce anything else they were holding for the dead leader. But no such violence was required as everyone immediately complied very efficiently hoping to save their lives by being as accommodating as possible.
In a matter of minutes sixteen large canvas bags filled with secret documents each one of them five and a half feet high were locked up in a vault in Beria‘s office at the ministry under heavy guard day and night. The dozen or so members of the inner secretariat were all interrogated, tortured and shot within hours of Stalin‘s death. Beria refused to show the results of those interrogations to the Presidium that in the meantime had approved a proposal that the functions held by Stalin would be split in a dual arrangement between Beria and Malenkov thus creating the first timid form of collective leadership. There was some whispering about the autopsy performed on Stalin that was said to show abnormally heavy stomach bleeding that could only be caused by poisoning. But that report was suppressed and an altered report was published indicating that the dictator had died because of the multiple effects of a massive stroke.
In the police apparatus Beria’s men suddenly reigned supreme and Sudoplatov obtained greatly expanded responsibilities while Merkulov was slated to obtain a key position, possibly as Beria’s main deputy.
In the third floor office at the Lubyanka, Feklisov and Yatskov were whispering excitedly in a corner, both visibly frightened and wondering whether there would now be a purge of the services to eliminate all of Beria’s enemies.
“Have you heard? Stalin is really dead, and Beria is now in charge! It‘s not official yet but the radio will announce it in a few hours. He is expected to move ahead with a major purge of the hard-line Stalinist elements. I heard that they have already executed the guards and the inner circle at the Kremlin! They were arrested early this morning by Beria and a group led by Serov who ordered them to the first floor of this building and then shot them one by one in the sound proof rooms in the cellar! The private secretaries, the drivers and many others were all tortured and put to death in a few hours. Stalin’s files were immediately carted away by Sudoplatov and Merkulov who are both back in the saddle! They immediately grabbed the most secret stuff...from the inner office and his desk! Can you imagine what those files contain?” said Yatskov smoking nervously.
Feklisov was also nervous but remained calm and as usual asked the most obvious but central question.
“How will this affect us?”
Yatskov replied,
“If we’re lucky it will blow away, over our heads, we’re small fry so for us it should be business as usual. But as we all know lots of nasty accounts are bound to be settled in the wake of this storm! I don‘t see types like Malenkov suddenly jumping to join an anti-Stalin cabal, it‘s too soon and too dangerous, the country might snap after so many years of repression. The new boys will need the system to continue as it exists just to hold on to power.”
Kvasnikov concurred,
“I agree. If there is anarchy it will spread like wildfire and make 1917 look like a picnic! Meanwhile from the reports we have it looks like Eisenhower plans to show no mercy for the Rosenbergs. He is under too much pressure from the right wing and McCarthy but also a majority of American and even world opinion that is demanding that an example be set. The Red spies therefore must die. The international demonstrations have probably already made it impossible for the Americans to lose face should they not send them to the electric chair!”
Yatskov nodded,
“Well, what do you expect…it’s the result that the dead Boss was seeking anyway, two grand martyrs to the cause of the working class and both of them Jews to boot! What a joke! If only the world knew how Stalin really felt about the Jews! Since we were unable to get the Rosenbergs out when it was still possible he will be overjoyed to see that his wishes were fulfilled, posthumously. Feklisov, I know that you still are dreaming of schemes to save them but destiny has set its course and I can’t see anyone interfering from our side! If Beria hadn’t stumbled into this unexpected Stalinist group of poisonous rats like Malenkov, and that awful hypocrite Khrushchev! Maybe he’d have a chance but as it is, I doubt it very much. We just have to survive this change as best we can.”
In late March 1953, less than three weeks after Stalin‘s death, the executive branch of the French government that included the Prime Minister René Mayer, Foreign Minister Georges Bidault and the Minister for the Associated States of Indochina Jean Letou
rneau accompanied by Albert de Savigny acting as his special assistant and an assortment of military brass flew to Washington. During the long and very rough flight in a DC4, Bidault managed to discuss Barnave’s position with Savigny,
“I fear for our friend Barnave. He has become a most unwanted witness and may be considered very dangerous to the new Russian set up. He is the kind of player the Soviets can no longer trust. You will have to keep your distance from him, understood?”
“Yes, Monsieur le Ministre, perhaps we should make sure he receives additional protection…a bodyguard…?”
Bidault looked at the ceiling for a few seconds as the plane went through more turbulence,
“You told me some time ago that the new leader wanted Barnave to move to Moscow and reside there permanently? No wonder he is getting nervous. I would as well! Permanence in Russia is a somewhat problematic matter, don’t you agree? Sic transit gloria mundi...”
“One may assume that his lifespan could be shortened unnaturally... I have seen reports from SDECE and DST alluding to an execution squad like those of the 1937-38 purge period except that now they have become very sophisticated and will avoid messy complications when operating in the west. Barnave is no fool and he is stalling all he can about traveling to Beria’s Russia, which is reason enough for them to kill him right in our own backyard in Paris.”
Bidault nodded but didn’t comment and moved on to other matters. Later on in Washington on the presidential yacht Williamsburg, Ike drew him aside with Allen Dulles,
“So this Beria story is for real. They knocked off Stalin just as they had promised!”
“The group in question was lucky that Beria took the lead and made it happen. Without him there would have been no change. Stalin was preparing another major purge of the party, the army and secret police as murderous and extensive as in 1937. Lists were ready for massive liquidations. They were compelled to act far sooner than they expected and some still hesitated at the last minute apparently! Beria took charge and managed to poison Stalin provoking a fatal stroke but still the dictator wasn’t dead. He then managed to have his doctor administer a second fatal injection provoking a massive heart attack. They made it look as though the cause of death was completely natural still fearing public outcry: even communists are afraid of the ferocity of an angry mob!”
