by Simon Ings
Lavrenty Beria arrived. Suspicious of his scientists even now, he had with him two Russian observers who had witnessed the American nuclear tests at Bikini in 1946 to confirm the authenticity of the blast. With a complete lack of ceremony, the order was given to detonate the device. Kurchatov went to the door and opened it. It would take thirty seconds for the shock wave to reach the command post. When the hand on the clock reached zero, the doorway was flooded with light.
For a moment or so it dimmed, then grew brighter very quickly. A white fireball engulfed the tower and rushed upwards, changing colour as it went. The blast wave at the base swept up everything in its path: houses, machines, stones, logs, girders. The mushroom cloud reached a height of about eight kilometres before losing its outlines and turning into a torn heap of clouds.
Beria asked his observers, ‘Haven’t we slipped up? Doesn’t Kurchatov humbug us?’ When he was told that the test had been successful, he ordered a telephone call put through to Stalin. It was two hours earlier in Moscow and Stalin’s secretary warned him that Stalin was still asleep. ‘It’s urgent, wake him up,’ Beria insisted.
Stalin came to the phone. ‘What do you want?’ he muttered, ‘Why are you calling?’
‘Everything went right,’ Beria announced.
‘I know already’, said Stalin, and hung up the phone.
Beria went wild with anger. ‘Who told him?’ he cried. ‘You are letting me down! Even here you spy on me! I’ll grind you to dust!’9
*
Beria was right to be afraid. Stalin’s mind was weakening and, as his grip on reality loosened, so he became ever more of a danger to those around him. ‘It became more and more obvious that Stalin was weakening mentally as well as physically,’ Khrushchev recalled in his memoirs. ‘This was especially clear from his eclipses of mind and losses of memory.’ Stalin’s morbid suspicions destroyed the family members of his closest supporters. Molotov’s wife Polina was arrested in 1949. Members of Stalin’s own family were arrested and sent to camps. In 1951 Stalin confessed to Khrushchev, at that time one of his closest advisors, ‘I’m finished, I trust no one, not even myself.’10
Stalin’s paranoia and formidable survival instinct pushed him into pronouncements that were more and more peculiar. Unable to trust even himself, it came to Joseph Stalin that people were, or ought to be, completely readable from first to last. All it needed was an entirely verbal theory of mind. ‘There is nothing in the human being which cannot be verbalised,’ he asserted, in 1949. ‘What a person hides from himself he hides from society. There is nothing in the Soviet society that is not expressed in words. There are no naked thoughts. There exists nothing at all except words.’11 For Stalin, at the end of his life, even a person’s most inner world was readable – because if it wasn’t, then it couldn’t possibly exist.
The paranoid fantasies of an old man – even an old man with his finger on the nuclear button – would have had little purchase on history. What made Stalin’s final mental manoeuvres extraordinary was the way they played out in the real world. Stalin’s last rewritings of the historical and political record were extraordinarily effective. They were, in a terrible and malign way, his masterwork. Yes, Stalin lost touch with reality – but he took the entire country along for the ride.
These final and terrible manipulations had begun with the purge of colleagues who, in Stalin’s view, had attained too much power and importance by the end of the Second World War. Andrei Zhdanov was one such victim. Already his health was failing, and as the time of the Lenin Academy’s Autumn Session neared, the Politburo had given him permission to leave for a two-month holiday in order to recover. Once Zhdanov left Moscow his political career went into a predictable decline. During July, several of his protégées lost their posts. Zhdanov’s health, meanwhile, came under the care of unfamiliar doctors who advised not total rest, but exercise and harmful massages. Only one of them – Lydia Timashuk, a cardiographer – diagnosed Zhdanov’s heart attacks correctly, but her diagnoses were overruled and Zhdanov was told to take long walks in the park. Timashuk, appalled, wrote personally to Stalin, denouncing her colleagues. Stalin received the letter, filed it, and did nothing. Andrei Zhdanov died at the end of August. At his grand funeral Stalin helped bear the coffin and spent the rest of the day getting blind drunk.
After Andrei Zhdanov’s death, a new purge swept through Leningrad, and the bases of power and patronage he had managed to establish there. Around seventy senior officials were arrested and convicted of various offences, along with family members, in rigged trials. The purges spread from patrons to clients, from the centres of power in Leningrad to outlying acquaintances in regions as far flung as Novgorod and Crimea.12
It took Stalin around three years to transform the inciting incident of this purge – Andrei Zhdanov’s unexpected and suspicious death – into a national Jewish conspiracy and an anti-semitic witch-hunt.
Anti-semitic feeling was not new to Russia and its client republics, although the Bolsheviks had always paid lip service, at least, to the duties they owed their Jewish minority. Now campaigns against ‘stateless cosmopolitanism’ – campaigns that had been conceived largely by Andrei Zhdanov – were stirring up considerable anti-Jewish feeling, and even the government-funded wartime Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee came under fire. In January 1949 – once its leader, the actor Solomon Mikhoels, was killed in a highly suspicious car crash – the committee’s members were arrested and charged with spying for the United States. (The newspapers went even further, accusing committee member Lina Shtern and others of conspiring to create a Jewish state in the Crimea.)
All those arrested were tortured. All ‘confessed’. Semyon Ignatiev, the new minister of state security, offered to sentence ‘all Jewish nationalists, American spies … excluding Shtern, to be shot. Shtern is to be exiled to a remote area for ten years.’13
On 12 August 1952, the sentence was carried out. Thirteen of the fifteen were secretly executed and their families deported to remote parts of Siberia and Kazakhstan. One died in prison. Shtern was sentenced to five years’ exile in Kazakhstan.14
Soon afterwards the anti-cosmopolitan campaign lost all political trappings and became openly a campaign against Soviet Jewry. The campaign was indiscriminate. It hardly mattered what your political history had been. Abram Ioffe, the founder of Soviet physics, came unstuck when he was caught calling himself a Russian on official paperwork. On 5 July 1951 he wrote to the personnel office of the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute: ‘In view of the disagreement in my documents on the question of my nationality, I request to define my nationality according to the origin of my parents as Jewish.’ He was then relieved of his position as director of the institute.
Another highly placed victim was Isaak Prezent, following an anonymous denunciation pointing up his Jewishness. For years Prezent had been making a nuisance of himself with the female students15 and few were sorry to see the back of him. ‘Do you know who just came to me?’ announced Grigory Roskin to his laboratory staff one day. The man who with his wife had developed the ‘cruzin’ anti-cancer treatment, and been denounced for his trouble, had been made blisteringly angry by the visit of this ‘strange, short man’. ‘Bloody Prezent!’ Roskin exclaimed. ‘He asked me to give him cruzin. I didn’t give it to him.’ (Prezent died of cancer in 1969, a few days after being expelled from the Lenin Academy.)16
The ‘Doctors’ Plot’ was unveiled on 13 January 1953 by Pravda, in an article heavily edited by Stalin and under the title ‘Ignoble Spies and Killers under the Mask of Professor–Doctors’. ‘Some time ago,’ the TASS news agency reported, ‘the bodies of State Security uncovered a group of terrorist doctors who set themselves the task of cutting short the lives of prominent public figures in the Soviet Union by administering harmful treatments.’
Andrei Zhdanov was listed as one of the victims. Much was made of this, though Zhdanov had been virtually forgotten – the first anniversary of his death had merited no more than an article o
n Pravda’s page three.
On 20 January 1953, Lydia Timashuk – the woman who had accused her fellow physicians of mishandling Zhdanov’s illness – was invited to the Kremlin to receive Stalin’s personal thanks for her ‘great courage’. The next day a bemused Timashuk was awarded the Order of Lenin for trying to save the life of a Soviet leader in the teeth of a Jewish conspiracy. Her letters to the Politburo and to Stalin were unearthed. Clearly the ‘conspiracy’ had hidden them from their intended recipients. Within days, Timashuk was cast as the heroine of the Doctors’ Plot. Poems were dedicated to her. She was compared to Joan of Arc.
Nine doctors, six of them Jewish, were arrested. Among them was Yakov Rapoport, the young physician who had responded so sarcastically to Olga Lepeshinskaya’s ‘ground-breaking’ discoveries, and was now one of Stalin’s personal physicians.
Natalya Rapoport, Yakov’s daughter, remembers the hatreds unleashed by the plot: ‘People refused to be treated by Jewish doctors. The air reeked of pogrom … There were rumours that, for the sake of “protecting” the others – the innocent Jews – from all this mass hatred, camps were being set up for them in Siberia.’17
The Doctors’ Plot was a masterpiece of political manipulation, providing Stalin with an alibi for Zhdanov’s death while busying the Soviet public with yet another conspiracy scare. At the same time, there is the most dreadful emptiness about the whole affair. Anti-semitism was not a strong force in Soviet life. Once Stalin died, the entire campaign petered out in a matter of days. Why then had he been so set on stirring hatreds that could bring neither him nor the state any advantage? The direct victims of the affair – the doctors accused of murdering high officials of the Party – were just doctors. They wielded no especial influence. They had no power. They were entirely replaceable. A phone call would have done it. Why, then, the manufacture of a national scandal? Stalin’s physical and cognitive decline had reduced his world to a few rooms and the ministrations of a handful of doctors. Stalin no more trusted them than he trusted anyone else, so he had done what he had always done: he had set out to destroy them. And he had used the weapons he had always used: spell-binding, nation-swallowing terror.
*
Death beat Stalin to the draw. The leader’s last hours were extraordinarily painful. Following a stroke, Stalin’s doctors struggled in panic to keep him alive. They tried everything. They even bled him with leeches. ‘The death agony was horrible,’ his daughter Svetlana later said,
he literally choked to death as we watched. At what seemed like the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry and full of fear and death.18
At 9.50 p.m. on 5 March 1953 the reign of one of the greatest mass murderers in history came to an end.
Notes
1. Cited in Mira Liehm and Antonín J. Liehm, The Most Important Art: Eastern European Film after 1945, p. 55.
2. Michurin is the name the film went by domestically; under the title Life in Bloom it was given extensive overseas distribution, and the New York Times ran a positive review.
3. Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, Volume 1: Commissar, 1918–1945, p. 522.
4. Stephen Brain, ‘The Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature’, Environmental History 15, no. 4 (1 October 2010), p. 684.
5. Quoted in Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom, pp. 89–90.
6. Marcel Penant, a French scientist and communist, writing in 1957 in La Pensée remembers he was so startled by Lysenko’s claim, he assumed it was a mistranslation, ‘until Lysenko repeated it to me word for word in the course of a discussion with which he favoured me in 1950 … I allowed myself to put a question to him: “I admit that young trees should be planted in a cluster; they may thus be better protected at first; but is it not necessary to remove some of them after a few years?” “No,” replied Lysenko, explaining: “They will sacrifice themselves for one.” “Do you mean,” I replied, “‘that one will turn out to be stronger and the others will weaken or perish?” “No,” he repeated, “they will sacrifice themselves for the good of the species,” and he entered into a long and very hazy discourse, completely overwhelming me with a “materialistic” explanation which would have been acceptable to Bernardin de Saint Pierre, and which was very close to a belief in divine Providence.’
7. Peter Kneen, ‘Physics, Genetics and the Zhdanovshchina’, Europe–Asia Studies, 50 (1998), pp. 1183–1202
8. Zuberi, ‘Stalin and the Bomb’, p. 1142.
9. Ibid., p. 1147
10. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, p. 273.
11. Caesar P. Korolenko and Dennis V. Kensin, ‘Reflections on the Past and Present State of Russian Psychiatry’, Anthropology and Medicine 9, no. 1 (2002), p. 54.
12. For a full account see Benjamin Tromly, ‘The Leningrad Affair and Soviet Patronage Politics, 1949–1950’, Europe–Asia Studies 56, no. 5 (July 2004), pp. 707–29.
13. Joshua Rubenstein and V. P. Naumov (eds), Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.
14. Stalin’s death saved Lina Shtern from the full rigour of the judgment. She spent only ten months in Dzhambul. Released from exile, she refused to speak about her ordeal.
15. In 1948 Prezent had become chair of the Darwinian Departments at Moscow and Leningrad. Students and professors alike were obliged to attend Prezent’s lectures in Michurinist biology. The exams at the end of this course of ‘re-education’ acquired a bad reputation. Prezent had a habit of inviting female students to his apartment for the exam. The wise ones turned up with strong male chaperones.
16. In Birstein, The Perversion of Knowledge, p. 260.
17. Yakov L. Rapoport, The Doctors’ Plot, pp. 74, 79.
18. S. Allilueva, Twenty Letters to a Friend, p. 18.
21: Succession
Full circle: Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovsky (left) and the mathematician Alexey Liapunov conduct ‘Vernadskological’ studies of radioisotopes at an experimental station near Lake Miassovo, 1957.
Every theory of the world that is at all powerful and covers a large domain of phenomena carries immanent within itself its own caricature.1
Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, 1985
Upon his death, Joseph Stalin’s natural successor, deputy premier Lavrenty Beria, set about dismantling the case against the Kremlin doctors. He announced that their confessions had been obtained through torture, and he threw out the charges. Various reforms were proposed – but Beria’s bid for self-reinvention would not play. The idea of the man who had overseen the Soviet atomic project using that knowledge as leverage to seize power galvanised Khrushchev and other highly placed leaders into a conspiracy. Beria was arrested on 26 June 1953. Denounced as an agent of international imperialism, he was tried in secret and, on 23 December, shot.
When Khrushchev was made General Secretary of the Party, the Academy of Sciences did what they thought was necessary and elected him as an Honorary Member. They were in for a surprise: Khrushchev refused to accept the honour. He had, he said, no pretensions of being a scientist.
Many expressed delight at Khrushchev’s modesty, and welcomed his bid to replace the forced marriage of academia and government with a cordial working relationship. The new leader’s gesture did not convince everyone, however. The geneticist Raissa Berg commented: ‘This means that he will annihilate the Academy of Sciences.’
The problem was that Khrushchev was as much of a sucker for homespun folk wisdom as the rest of his generation, and took considerable pride in those little bits of folk wisdom that had come down to him personally. He caused a small sensation when he told a group of agricultural specialists that he lacked their expert knowledge, and they had to tell him when he was wrong. But when a couple of them took him at his word and sent him a memo criticising his wild effort to spread maize cultivation into unsuitable regions, he scolded them angrily. What on earth were they on about? He himself had grown maize successfully in
his dacha garden near Moscow!2
With hindsight, it is easy to see that it would be only a matter of time before Khrushchev fell under the sway of Trofim Lysenko, completely and unquestioningly, in a way Stalin never had.
To begin with, Stalin’s death ushered in a certain pluralism. Shtern returned from exile. Vladimir Engelhardt, a friend of genetics, replaced Oparin as Secretary of the Biology Division of the Academy of Sciences. Orbeli turned up at a meeting of the Physiology Society with an ovation that lasted minutes.
Still, Lysenko’s allies were secure in their high bureaucratic positions at ministries, academies and universities.
The biggest threat to Lysenko’s position was not the reopening of old fault lines in biology – he had long since learned how to profit from them – so much as the way his old enemies were regrouping under a new banner entirely: one he did not understand and did not know how to respond to.
To Lysenko’s considerable alarm, genetic research was coming back into fashion, but this time it was being conducted, not in biological institutions (which were controlled by the Lysenkoists), but under the roofs of physical and chemical research institutes.
Three years after Stalin’s death, Soviet genetics was effectively reestablished, albeit under some strange-looking camouflage, as ‘radio-biology’, or ‘radiation bio-physics’, or sometimes ‘physicochemical biology’. Having earned certain privileges in the Cold War, Russia’s physics community was now coming to the rescue of genetics – a field that physicists had held in fascinated esteem ever since Niels Bohr began dreaming up ideas of ‘quantum biology’. At the very least, genetics promised to explain living processes by chemical and even physical laws.
Igor Kurchatov’s Institute of Atomic Energy – the institute at the very heart of Soviet atomic bomb development – soon included half a dozen separate genetics laboratories. Restored as director of his Institute of Physical Problems in January 1955, Peter Kapitsa, the pioneer of low-temperature physics, sponsored a major event on molecular genetics, where Igor Tamm and geneticist Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovsky (‘conditionally released from prison because of great successes in scientific research work’) spoke to a packed audience. It was an occasion unthinkable at any biology institute.
