Russia's War

by Richard Overy

  During the summer of 1942 the Government began to explore the possibility of atomic warfare. Senior scientists concluded that the Soviet Union should begin its own programme to catch up with what was happening in Germany and the West. The decision to start a bomb programme was made by Stalin at some time in the summer, but it was not until November 1942 that Kurchatov was appointed to head Laboratory Number 2 in Moscow, where the Soviet bomb project was to be based. Progress remained slow. Kurchatov lacked a cyclotron, needed for particle separation. The one built before the war in Leningrad was only two miles from the front line of the siege. In March 1943 two scientists were flown to the city to arrange the transfer of the seventy-five-ton machine by rail through the narrow lifeline that had been opened up to the beleaguered defenders. The staff assigned to Soviet atomic research was tiny in comparison with the American Manhattan Project. In 1944 Laboratory Number 2 boasted only twenty-five scientists and forty-nine other personnel. There was almost no uranium. Despite efforts to persuade the United States to provide quantities of the mineral, only one kilogram of poor-quality uranium metal was supplied, together with a larger quantity of uranium powder. Geological exploration in the Soviet Union was conducted half-heartedly. In 1945 most of Kurchatov's supplies came from stocks captured in Germany.

  The chief barrier to a more intensive project was the scepticism of the Soviet leadership. Molotov, who was in charge of the overall programme, and Beria, who was in charge of the foreign intelligence on atomic research, were neither of them convinced that the atomic bomb was a feasible weapon, or that the Manhattan Project was close, in 1945, to its first explosion. Stalin and Beria, from habit, half thought that the generous supply of secret scientific intelligence from the United States was part of an elaborate hoax. ‘If this is disinformation,’ Beria told the Soviet research team, ‘I'll put you all in the cellar!’44 The explosion of an atomic bomb at Hiroshima was thus more of a surprise to Stalin than his calm behaviour at Potsdam suggested. On 20 August 1945, two weeks after the atomic attack, Beria was put in charge of a ‘Special Committee for the Atom Bomb’. Stalin ordered unlimited resources to be made available to produce the Soviet bomb. Loyal scientists were promised rewards: their own dacha, cars and a generous pay rise. For those of more doubtful loyalty conditions were different. Under Beria, half the workers engaged on the nuclear programme were organized in special prisons known as sharashi. In Georgia, close to Beria's own birthplace, a group of German physicists recruited to assist the Soviet programme lived under constant police surveillance in total and demoralizing isolation from the outside world.

  The first nuclear reactor was successfully tested on Christmas Day 1946. Beria, who was present, was so excited by the experiment that he had to be dissuaded from entering the radioactive building, though many of those present must have hoped that he would. The first Soviet bomb was exploded less than three years later. The design was based on the American plutonium bomb, details of which had been supplied by Fuchs in June 1945. The test took place on the Kazakhstan steppe, not far from a newly built scientific settlement called Semipalatinsk-21, named after the nearest large town, less than a hundred miles distant. Around the tower that held the bomb were constructed buildings of brick or wood, bridges, tunnels and water towers to allow the scientists to evaluate the impact of the explosion. Tanks, guns and locomotives were distributed throughout the area for the same purpose. Animals were placed in pens and sheds so that studies could be made of the effects of radiation. Kurchatov supervised the whole operation and fixed the test for 29 August 1949, at six o'clock in the morning. The scientists knew that their personal survival depended on the success of the test. Beria turned up a week before, and watched the proceedings every day. On the morning of the 29th, in a small command post built six miles from the bomb tower, sheltered from the effects of blast by a rampart of earth, Kurchatov and Beria gathered with their staff to watch the test. It was cloudy, with a strong north wind. The tower was just visible in the distance. Kurchatov ordered the countdown to begin, and there ensued a wait of thirty nail-biting minutes. Everything worked exactly as planned. On zero an intense bright light shone forth from the top of the tower, illuminating the surrounding countryside. The shock wave reached the command post half a minute later, with a noise ‘like the roar of an avalanche’. Smoke and debris rose into the upper sky, and hung there briefly before the wind dispersed them over the distant southern steppe. A converted tank rumbled towards the scene loaded with scientific instruments and the deputy minister of health. The sandy soil had turned to glass and crackled beneath the tracks of the tank. The steel tower had vaporized.45

  Beria, who had been extremely nervous before the test, embraced and kissed Kurchatov. In his anxiety he wanted to check that the result looked the same as those of American tests and lost valuable time before his triumphant telephone call to Stalin. By the time he called, Stalin had already been informed and had immediately hung up. Beria punched the officer who had informed the Kremlin: ‘You have put a spoke in my wheel, traitor. I'll grind you to pulp.’46 Beria need not have worried. The test pleased Stalin. The scientists were generously rewarded. Kurchatov got a Soviet limousine, a cottage in the Crimea, free education for his children at any school he chose and free travel anywhere in the Soviet Union. The leading scientists all became Heroes of Socialist Labour. For once the accolade was richly deserved. Working under the pressure of the Stalinist state, under the direction of ruthless men who knew no science, Soviet scientists developed a bomb in only a little longer time than it had taken the American team. They were helped by espionage, though not as much as has usually been asserted. Fuchs provided a description of the plutonium bomb but little detailed information on how to reach the state of making the finished product. The main barrier to even faster production was the shortage of uranium.

  The Soviet bomb did not alter the strategic balance immediately – by 1950 the United States had 298 bombs and 250 long-range aircraft to deliver them – but it gave Stalin the knowledge that the quantum leap over the technical gap between the two sides (represented by Hiroshima and Nagasaki) had been made. In 1949 he also began a programme of conventional rearmament to match the growing threat from the Western states, which in April 1949 had formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). From then until Stalin's death in 1953 the Soviet face to the West was increasingly uncompromising and defiant. Stalin himself was preoccupied with the threat of war and his own growing infirmity. In 1947 he suffered a minor stroke. On the eve of his seventieth birthday, 21 December 1949, he suffered a serious dizzy spell. He had permanently high blood pressure but would not allow doctors to administer to him, so profound was his distrust of medical experts. He gave up smoking and took longer vacations in the summer months, but otherwise compromised his routine of work very little. His daughter described a man who in his final years lived on his nerves, convinced that he would die a violent death, so many and so deep were the hatreds he had aroused. ‘I'm finished, Khrushchev heard him declare in 1951. ‘I trust no one, not even myself.’47

  This state of mind perhaps explains the more dangerous condition of the confrontation with the West in the early 1950s and the final paroxysm of terror that enveloped the Soviet state in the last years of his rule. Stalin had announced in February 1946 that the real cause of war in 1939, and of any future wars, was the capitalist system itself, which contained the seeds of ‘general crisis and warlike clashes’.48 From 1949 he thought he could once again see the force of that ideological truth: a new world war would, in the long run, be difficult to avoid. In February 1951 Pravda published an interview with Stalin in which the new threat of a world war ‘organized by the ruling circles of the United States’ was the central message. At the 19th Party Congress, held in October 1952, the first since 1939, Malenkov returned again to the theme of a ‘third world war’. The day after the congress Stalin addressed the Central Committee. He told them that he was old and would soon die. He wanted them to continue his life's work. Accor
ding to Konstantin Simonov, a new member, Stalin gave them a warning: ‘A difficult struggle with the capitalist camp lay ahead and that the most dangerous thing in this struggle was to flinch, to take fright, to retreat, to capitulate.’49 The talk in the armed forces was all about war. The mood created among the general public by the fresh war scare could have been little but despondent.

  Did Stalin seek a final apocalyptic conflict to stamp his mark on Russian history forever? There is no real evidence to suggest that Stalin thought about war as something immediate, or that he contemplated a pre-emptive strike, although Khrushchev later described the fear the leadership all felt ‘that America would invade the Soviet Union‘. Stalin, in Khrushchev's account, ‘trembled at the prospect… was afraid of war’ and ‘knew his weakness’ – a revelation that may also help to explain his desperate efforts to avoid a conflict in 1941.50 A more likely explanation is that war psychosis was exploited, as it was in the 1920s and 1930s, as a factor in domestic politics. In 1952 ominous signs appeared on all sides that the country was about to be engulfed by a new wave of orchestrated violence. Stalin chose the 19th Congress to launch an unexpectedly sharp attack on some senior ministers, including Molotov, for their failure to face up to the enemy with sufficient toughness. The ministers sat through the tirade ashen-faced and unmoving. Over the two months that followed, the shape of the new terror became visible. A Zionist plot to kill off Soviet politicians and military leaders, backed by the CIA, was unearthed. Anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism were exploited to create a popular hysteria that would give the new purge its shallow justification.

  The idea of a Zionist plot has already been remarked upon. Jewish intellectuals arrested since 1949 had been routinely charged with conspiring to undermine the Soviet state while in the pay of American Jews and the CIA. In the summer of 1952 the trial of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was completed. On June 4 a paediatrician at the Kremlin Polyclinic, Yevgenia Lifshits, was arrested, but despite torture and blackmail she refused to incriminate her Jewish colleagues. She was taken to the Serbsky Forensic Psychiatry Clinic for special treatment. The KGB's target was the former chief physician of the Red Army during the war, Meer Vovsi. Evidence was found in the alleged mystery surrounding the death of Andrei Zhdanov in 1948 from heart failure. At the time the electrocardiographer, Lidya Timashuk, a KGB spy, wrote a report for the security ministry accusing the doctors of misdiagnosing Zhdanov's condition. The autopsy exonerated the physicians, but the report was filed away. In the autumn of 1952 it resurfaced how is not entirely clear and was used not only to demote the head of the KGB and Stalin's long-serving personal secretary, Aleksandr Poskrebyshev, for lack of vigilance, but also to attack the doctors. Timashuk was hailed as a model citizen, and awarded the Order of Lenin by Stalin himself for what Pravda called ‘patriotism, resoluteness and courage’ in exposing ‘the enemies of the Homeland’. The unfortunate Vovsi was arrested on November 11, by which time the security forces had everything they needed to begin a campaign against a number of senior doctors alleged to be at the very heart of the Zionist terrorist conspiracy.51

  The ‘Doctors’ Plot ' was the last and in many ways the most fantastic of the many conspiracies that were fabricated under Stalin. It is not clear that Stalin was the instigator of the new purge, though his approval was needed for it to proceed. The exact chain of responsibility may never be established with certainty. It may have been orchestrated by Khrushchev as a clumsy attempt to get at Beria and to move one step closer to the succession.52 The victims caught up in the purge were not only Jewish doctors and intellectuals. Stalin's personal doctor, Vladimir Vinogradov, was arrested on November 7. Stalin is alleged to have discovered Vinogradov's medical notes on him, which suggested ‘freedom from all work’. In his fury Stalin called out, ‘Put him in leg irons.’ Obedient to a fault, and against the usual practice with prisoners, his Lubyanka jailers shackled the elderly professor. Stalin's long-serving bodyguard, Nikolai Vlasik, was first demoted, then in December arrested. Viktor Abakumov, the former head of the KGB, was arrested for failing to detect the conspiracy. The senior doctors at the Kremlin clinic and other leading medical institutions were seized and incarcerated in the Lubyanka or the Lefortovo Prison in Moscow.53

  On 13 January 1953 the Tass news agency announced the Doctors' Plot to the public. Nine senior doctors were named as the ringleaders; hundreds were now in prison. They were accused of membership of a Zionist terrorist gang. Vovsi, it was claimed, had admitted that he was under orders ‘to destroy leading statesmen of the USSR’.54 Vinogradov, Stalin's personal physician, was discovered to have been a long-standing British agent. The confessions spawned hundreds of new arrests. Jews everywhere were the victims of a sudden wave of spontaneous anti-Semitism. Jewish plots were unearthed against the Moscow Metro and in the Moscow Automobile Plant. The momentum was irresistible. The Jewish-bourgeois-nationalist was the new kulak. The Doctors' Plot thickened. Stalin agreed to, or perhaps instigated, wider plans to deport the Jews to the east.

  Deportation was not new either; it was entirely consistent with the habits of the regime since the 1930s. It is hard to refute the evidence assembled by Arkady Vaksberg, who as a young Jew came face to face with the anti-Semitic outrage in the spring of 1953. Extra prison capacity was ordered; railway cars were collected at Moscow stations; wooden huts were hastily constructed in Birobidzhan; lists of Moscow Jews were drawn up and sent to the security police in each Moscow district. In mid-February, while the doctors and their accomplices were being forced to confess to absurd crimes, a plan was hatched with all the hallmarks of Stalinist political guile. Prominent Jewish intellectuals and leaders were invited to sign an open letter to Pravda calling on Stalin to save the Jewish people from further persecutions – occasioned by the criminal lapses of a handful of Jewish nationalists – by transporting them to the east, out of harm's way. Most of those asked to sign did so rather than risk their own imprisonment. The trial of the doctors was set for March; the evidence suggests that deportation was intended to follow.55

  The resurrection of violent Jewish persecution was interrupted, though not entirely suspended, by the death of Stalin. The full details of the dictator's last days were finally published in 1989. He spent what proved to be his final day in his Kremlin office on February 17 and left for his dacha at Kuntsevo. On February 27 he attended Swan Lake, hidden from view and alone in a box in the Bolshoi Theatre. The following day he watched a film and returned to his dacha with Khrushchev, Malenkov, Bulganin and Beria, where they stayed until four o'clock in the morning drinking Georgian wine so weak that Stalin called it ‘juice’. When they left, he told his guards, allegedly for the very first time, that they could go to sleep, too, a fact that has allowed unsubstantiated speculation to thrive about what might have happened while they dozed. The following day the guards waited but heard nothing. At six in the evening the light in Stalin's bedroom went on. Nothing more was heard; by ten o'clock in the evening the guards were alarmed enough to risk waking their sleeping boss. He was discovered, barely conscious, on the floor, his arm lifted in mute supplication, his trousers soiled.56

  He was lifted onto a sofa, and the KGB chief was called. There are a number of versions of what followed. The most plausible testimony was provided by Peter Lozgachev, the deputy commandant of the dacha, though he recalled the events long afterwards. The first to arrive, hours after Stalin had been discovered collapsed, were Beria and Malenkov. No doctor was called – most of the senior Kremlin medical staff was in prison. Beria was angry at being disturbed. ‘Don't cause a panic… and don't disturb Comrade Stalin.’57 Not until the following morning, when Khrushchev appeared, were doctors summoned. Stalin was unattended by doctors for thirteen hours. Whether this was deliberate, an attempt to hasten the end of the tyrant by those who hoped to profit by his death, is beyond proof. It is equally likely that Beria and Malenkov genuinely thought that the sleeping Stalin, snoring lightly, was in less danger than his guards had supposed. Nor is it likely that
Stalin could have been saved even if medical help had been on hand during the night. He had suffered a massive cerebral haemorrhage.

  Stalin took three days to die. He recovered consciousness at times but never recovered the power of speech. The doctors applied leeches to his head and neck. Their hands trembled as Beria watched and cursed them. Stalin's successors stood and watched, all save Beria, who paced up and down, alternately reviling his master and smothering him with kisses and oaths of loyalty whenever he stirred. His final death agony, on the evening of March 5, was witnessed by his daughter. ‘At the last minute,’ she wrote, ‘he opened his eyes. It was a terrible look – either mad or angry and full of the fear of death.’58 He raised his left hand in a final gesture and ceased breathing. Beria scrambled out of the room, shouted for his car and drove to the Kremlin to organize the new Government. Three months later he was arrested by his ministerial colleagues and, on a date still unknown, executed. The other witnesses to Stalin's last moments stood gazing at their dead master, then left with greater dignity. The body was taken in a car for embalming. The news was announced to a stunned population. Despite everything that he had inflicted upon them, the Soviet people mourned him in their millions. The body lay in state in the Kremlin while thousands fought outside for a glimpse. People were crushed to death in the throng. He was laid next to Lenin in the Kremlin Mausoleum.