Stalin and His Hangmen (64 page)

War forced Stalin to dismantle his monolith. Within months he had learnt that he could not micro-manage a successful response to blitzkrieg, that generals and colonels had to make their own decisions. He had to allow the Church to rally the people. He could not win without the support of the hated West, and he had to make concessions. At times Stalin even had to tell the truth to his people. In his decree of 28 July 1942 he admitted: ‘The population is beginning to be disillusioned by the Red Army, and many curse it for handing our people to the yoke of the German oppressors, while retreating to the east… we no longer prevail over the Germans in human resources or supplies of grain.’ British and then American officers had to be allowed to walk the streets of Moscow and the northern ports, even fraternizing with Soviet officers and befriending Soviet women. Winston Churchill set aside all his knowledge and hatred of the Bolsheviks and welcomed Russia as an overnight ally, the first ray of hope for a beleaguered Britain. German planes would for a time have no more fuel from the Soviet oilfields, and the troops poised to invade Britain were now pouring east. Roosevelt, when six months later the USA joined the war, had no hesitation in embracing Stalin as an ally – or at least a deterrent – to tie down a significant number of Japanese divisions. Just as pragmatically, Stalin had to mask his contempt for Western statesmen and make some concessions in order to receive from his new allies leather, meat, vehicles, munitions and information that might stem the German tide. Stalin pretended to forget about Anglo-American intervention against the Bolsheviks in 1919; the British and Americans enforced silence in their own countries about Stalin’s crimes against humanity.

Stalin’s hangmen abandoned prophylactic killing; they had to see to their own survival and the nation’s. For a short while they encouraged Stalin to avenge the army’s defeats by shooting one hapless general after another, but within a year, like Stalin, they understood that professional officers, engineers and administrators were too precious to waste. The blood of the rank and file, civilians or soldiers, was still shed prodigiously, but the hangmen observed a truce in their war of attrition against the professional classes.

Beria Shares Power

In 1941, as war loomed, Stalin began to manipulate his henchmen in a new way. The dangers of arrest and execution receded, but so did the security of power. Stalin began to duplicate powers, to split commissariats, to switch his favours from one to another, to make his underlings jealous and suspicious of each other. The change in Stalin can be ascribed to his realization that his mental and physical powers were waning – he was now sixty-two years old – and that, for the first time since he had achieved power, his plans were going awry. The Red Army almost defeated by the Finns, Hitler sweeping through the Balkans, first isolating, then threatening the USSR, all proved his fallibility. He could no longer crush every obstacle in his path. He trusted nobody – not even himself, as he told Khrushchiov – and saw a potential assassin in every guard and every associate. Even more than before, he duplicated the channels that fed him information and avoided written instructions, often even verbal ones. A clenched fist to his teeth, a raised eyebrow was an order which could more easily be disavowed. Stalin began to be unpredictable and his hangmen reacted accordingly. They too hesitated to take any course of action that could not be stopped or reversed. They cooperated less and watched each other more. Even the old circle of Kaganovich, Voroshilov and Molotov lost its coherence.

Beria was better equipped, by personality and intelligence, than anyone else to cope with an ageing Stalin, but even he must have been dismayed on 3 February 1941. Days after making him general commissar of state security, Stalin sliced his empire in two. Beria remained commissar for internal affairs, but his remit was now mundane: traffic police, firemen and the GULAG empire. A separate Commissariat for State Security was hived off and Stalin appointed Beria’s loyal deputy, Vsevolod Merkulov, to the new commissariat. Beria had been warned not to monopolize power, but he was not in as precarious a position as Iagoda and Ezhov had been when they had lost sole command of state security. Beria and Merkulov were after all old allies; their working and personal relationships remained close.

Vsevolod Merkulov’s appointment was typical of the new tactics.
Stalin was throwing several scorpions into the box to see if one would kill the others. Another of Beria’s subordinates, Viktor Abakumov, replaced Merkulov as Beria’s deputy and was subsequently put in charge of military counter-intelligence. After the war, a couple of lesser scorpions from the security services, Rukhadze and Riumin, were thrown in to counteract these three.

Experience with Iagoda had taught Stalin that the security services could be controlled only by appointing someone from outside their remit. Stalin therefore promoted his former secretary and the editor of
Pravda
Lev Mekhlis into an intelligence and security overlord. Stalin was also tinkering again with the machinery of state. The party Politbiuro became a dead letter; decision-making passed to the government, the Council of Commissars and, when the Germans invaded, to the State Defence Committee, which comprised Stalin and his closest cronies. Apart from Molotov, Stalin now tended to prefer younger men – Beria, Zhdanov, Malenkov, Khrushchiov. Their servility was balanced by ruthless infighting that ensured they would never conspire together. Kaganovich was shifted away from the centre of power to terrorize the coal and oil industries and occasionally rally the armed forces’ morale with firing squads. Voroshilov was given tasks where he could do the war effort least damage.

Beria was too energetic and efficient to be dispensable. Stalin jokingly called him ‘our Himmler’, but he was also the Soviet Union’s Albert Speer. Like Kaganovich and Mekhlis, Beria used executions to terrify the hesitant, cowardly or incompetent; unlike them, he grasped military and technical arguments and was a canny judge of character and ability. Beria remained cool in the face of opposition and danger.

Merkulov, the most articulate and least repulsive member of Beria’s inner circle, throughout the war supplied foreign intelligence. He was an officer’s son and had been a second lieutenant in the Tsar’s army. In Tbilisi Merkulov had taught for three years in a school for the blind and in September 1921 he joined the Georgian Cheka. He faithfully stuck to Beria until the last day of their lives. At the height of the terror Merkulov cannily left the NKVD for trade and transport. When in September 1938 Beria took Merkulov to Moscow and back into the NKVD, he at first baulked at the physical torture of detainees. He was teased by Beria – ‘Theoretician!’

After dutifully organizing the killing of Poles at Katyn, Ostashkov and Smolensk, Merkulov’s next mission was in summer 1940, when he went incognito to Riga to purge Latvia’s middle classes. On his appointment as commissar for state security Merkulov found the Soviet intelligence service laid waste by Ezhov’s purges with the remnants too frightened of Stalin to tell him unpalatable truths. The NKVD’s best spies, including Richard Sorge, were not trusted.
¹
Two of Beria’s acolytes, Amayak Kobulov, Bogdan’s younger brother, and Dekanozov, were stationed in Berlin, Kobulov from September 1939 as first secretary and intelligence officer, Dekanozov from November 1940 as ambassador after spending the summer terrorizing Lithuania. Neither spoke German. The German Foreign Ministry did not know whether to be insulted or amused that the Soviet Union had sent such a physical and mental dwarf as Dekanozov, a toad with stubble, to match their urbane ambassador to Moscow, Count Schulenburg. Amayak Kobulov, on the other hand, was charming but dim, which made him an ideal conduit for Nazi disinformation. Vsevolod Merkulov thus transmitted to Stalin on 25 May 1941 what Stalin wanted to hear: ‘War between the Soviet Union and Germany is unlikely… German military forces gathered on the frontier are meant to show the Soviet Union the determination to act if they are forced to. Hitler calculates that Stalin will become more pliable and will stop any intrigues against Germany, but above all will supply more goods, especially oil.’

Stalin had sent Molotov to Berlin in November 1940 to negotiate terms on which the USSR might become an ally of Germany, Japan and Italy but the talks foundered on Molotov’s insistence that the USSR should take over Iran and western India. If Hitler contemplated letting the USSR take over parts of the British Empire, then, Stalin reasoned, the USSR was safe. Even Hitler’s attack on Yugoslavia in spring 1941 left Stalin unperturbed.

Beria himself had completed Ezhov’s work destroying Red Army intelligence: everyone of the rank of colonel or above had been shot. A few terrorized majors remained, their credentials having ethnically Russian surnames and knowing no foreign languages. To guess Hitler’s next move, they relied on gossip gleaned from central European military attachés or drunken SS officers. They drew no conclusions even when the German embassy in Moscow packed its furniture and families off home. They miscalculated the number of German troops on the Soviet
frontier as 40 per cent instead of 62 per cent of all Hitler’s forces. As late as March 1941, Lieutenant General Filipp Golikov, the squat, bald, scarlet-faced Blimp who now headed Red Army intelligence, perversely concluded: ‘Rumours and documents that speak of the inevitability of war against the USSR this spring must be assessed as disinformation emanating from English and even perhaps from German intelligence.’
²

When war broke out, Vsevolod Merkulov had the wit to steal others’ intelligence. Naum Eitingon was entrusted with nurturing five traitors in the British intelligence services – Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt and Cairncross. Through them, once the British had cracked the German Enigma encoding machine, Merkulov obtained for Stalin and his generals information on German armaments and plans. There were Soviet spies in Nazi Germany, but their warnings were dismissed and they were so carelessly handled that the Gestapo soon caught them. Moreover, Stalin insisted on raw intelligence; in his conceit, he would not let professionals analyse the information they gathered.
³

Even as commissar for state security, Merkulov devoted time to creative work. He had already written a pamphlet about Beria, ‘Loyal son of the Lenin-Stalin party’. Using the grandiose pseudonym Vsevolod Rokk (all-powerful fate), Merkulov staged his play
Engineer Sergeev
to applause all over Russia from 1942 to 1944. In the first disastrous months of the war, Sergeev has to blow up the electricity station he built. German agents, a former kulak, a White Guard and a Baltic German officer try to stop him. Helped by an NKVD lieutenant Sergeev destroys his beloved power station, killing himself and the German agents.

After Hiroshima, when Stalin conceded that the USSR had to have its atom bomb, Merkulov came into his own. With his education in physics, he understood what questions to ask his spies in Britain and America. Until then, Merkulov performed best his traditional NKVD work: reporting to Stalin on everything writers and film-makers said when they thought they were not overheard. Stalin and Zhdanov’s attack on the intelligentsia in 1946 was fuelled by intellectuals’ utterances during the war, when they felt courted, even treasured, and began to think aloud.

Beria’s other rival was Viktor Semionovich Abakumov. Supposedly born in 1908 to a hospital boilerman and a laundress, and without formal education, Abakumov matched Merkulov’s patrician style but
was violent, uncultured and devious.
⁴
Outside secret police work, Abakumov, tall and handsome, was interested only in women and luxury. In his early days Abakumov was called ‘Foxtrotter’ but in 1934 his career faltered when he began taking dancing partners to OGPU safe houses, not only for sex but to make them denounce whomever he next proposed to arrest. He was demoted to GULAG guard. In 1937 he found a new niche in the secret political and operational directorates of the NKVD for whom he installed listening equipment, and made searches and arrests. His physical strength and love of the job attracted the attention of Bogdan Kobulov, who induced Beria to let Abakumov run the turbulent southern city of Rostov on the Don. In February 1941, when Beria’s empire was cut in two, Stalin arranged for Abakumov to replace Merkulov as Beria’s deputy in the NKVD.

At first Abakumov ran border guards, uniformed police and fire brigades, but when war began, Stalin put Abakumov in charge of military counter-intelligence. Here Abakumov made an impact. He answered directly to Stalin and could ignore Beria. In spring 1943, as the fortunes of war turned in Russia’s favour, counter-intelligence became a powerful force. Abakumov became deputy to Stalin, who made himself both commissar of defence and supreme commander. Abakumov’s organization, even more dreaded than Beria’s, was SMERSH (Death to Spies). It had seven branches: it conducted surveillance over the army staff and all forces, it pursued and killed deserters and self-mutilators, it formed ‘blocking squads’ to shoot retreating soldiers, it supervised quartermasters and field hospitals, it filtered suspected collaborators in reoccupied territory, it watched over contact with allies and the enemy. SMERSH terrorized the army and all who lived in combat zones, and squeezed everything it could from German prisoners. SMERSH made death in battle preferable to retreat for Russians and to surrender for Germans, but as an intelligence organization it was a liability. Most of its men were as aggressive and ignorant as Abakumov; they shot or hanged many loyal and able officers and men.

Abakumov controlled his empire from a building opposite the Lubianka, from which he would emerge to stride the streets of Moscow, flinging 100-rouble notes to beggar women. Like Beria, Abakumov was considered just, even compassionate, only by his subordinates. In 1945 Stalin put Abakumov on the Soviet commission to prepare for the
Nuremberg trials of German war criminals. In 1946 Abakumov took Merkulov’s place as minister of state security, and held it until 1951. Beria, absorbed by the campaign to build atomic weapons, was no longer a rival, but although Abakumov oversaw two purges and numerous murders for Stalin, even he ultimately proved insufficiently vicious.