Stalin and His Hangmen (68 page)

Hungary, as a German ally, was treated with special caution. The British and American contingents on the Allied Control Commission and a shortage of skilled NKVD operators slowed Stalin’s takeover. Elections in 1945 were free and resulted in a majority for a peasant-based smallholders’ party. For two years Hungary seemed destined for the happy neutral status of Finland, where the prospect of serious armed conflict and of bad relations with Sweden kept Stalin from using force. In Hungary, however, which the Allies had tacitly assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence, there was no reason not to apply the salami tactics used on Czechoslovakia.

Viktor Abakumov’s SMERSH, far worse informed than Beria’s
NKVD, followed the Red Army into Hungary. There Abakumov made a blunder whose repercussions for Soviet foreign policy were as baleful as the murders committed by Beria and Merkulov at Katyn. In Budapest Abakumov detained Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish consul who had saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from the camps. He was sent to the Lubianka. In Soviet eyes he had been an intermediary between the Germans and Americans exploring the possibility of a separate peace. Wallenberg had also helped the Soviets barter valuable metals and had played a part in Finnish – Russian negotiations. Nikolai Bulganin, then reporting to Stalin as deputy minister of defence, signed the order for Wallenberg’s arrest. When SMERSH was wound up and Abakumov became minister of state security on 4 May 1946, Wallenberg remained his prisoner. Wallenberg, according to Pavel Sudoplatov, was interrogated forcefully at Lefortovo prison then housed in the Lubianka and invited to become a Soviet agent. He refused. On Molotov and Vyshinsky’s instructions, Wallenberg was killed, probably by a lethal injection from the toxicologist Professor Grigori Mairanovsky in the laboratory adjoining the Lubianka on 17 July 1947, and cremated. The Soviet cover-up was inept: claims that Wallenberg had suffered a fatal heart attack were undermined by Dekanozov blurting out to the Swedes immediately after Wallenberg’s arrest that he was in the Lubianka. Like the Katyn murders, Wallenberg’s murder was obfuscated by the Soviets for another thirty years and the records of his interrogation have almost certainly been destroyed.
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Beria’s main task in 1945–6 was to install a Soviet regime in each of the conquered territories. Viktor Abakumov’s was easier, if equally large in its scale: SMERSH had to repatriate about four million Soviet citizens – and some wretched ethnic Russian non-citizens – from western and central Europe. The largest contingent were the 1,836,000 surviving POWs. Despite their fragile state they went to filtration camps, and from there mostly to the GULAG as ‘traitors to the motherland’. The next largest contingent were Ukrainians and Russians, largely women, sent to Germany as forced labour. Only those who had at least two children by marriage to a foreigner escaped repatriation; the rest suffered the same fate as POWs, no matter how involuntary their stay in Germany. To aid the war effort Beria had reduced the number held in the GULAG from nearly two million in January 1941 to just over one million by January
1946. Abakumov’s SMERSH repatriated so many Soviet citizens that by the end of 1949 the GULAG’s population had climbed to an official 2,561,351. As in 1938 and 1942, so in 1947 the GULAG could not cope: the annual mortality rate doubled to nearly 4 per cent. In 1947 alone 66,830 prisoners died.

Abakumov was especially harsh to Soviet citizens and ethnic Russians who had fought on the German side. Unlike those Poles and Hungarians who had served with the Germans, they were not treated as POWs. The Russian Liberation Army formed by General Vlasov was handed over to the Soviets in its entirety, even though the British and Americans knew that Vlasovites were being executed on the dockside in Odessa and in the filtration camps in Austria. Vlasov’s men in some cases had turned against the Germans: the Vlasov army had liberated Prague before Marshal Konev’s men entered the city and on the island of Texel in Holland Georgian Vlasovites had allied themselves to the Dutch resistance. The Allies’ return of the Vlasovites was legally dubious and morally wicked.

Worse, in July 1945, the Allies handed over at Judenburg and Sankt Valentin 50,000 Cossacks and White Russians, together with their women and children, who had never been citizens of the USSR. Individual Cossacks had been guilty of atrocities, particularly against Serbs, but in an operation worthy of Stalin, a whole community was sent for extermination. The menfolk were killed before they reached the GULAG; the women and children were in eastern Siberia by October 1945. All traces vanish after 1949. Cossack commanders, who had operated under General von Panwitz, were personally interrogated by Abakumov and their statements read by Molotov and Stalin before they were tried. They were hanged in January 1947.

The Scent of Freedom

It is a truism that after losing a war any Russian government makes concessions to its population, and after winning a war the ungrateful regime turns on its own people. Stalin in 1945, only a thousand times more brutally, did what Alexander I had done in 1813 and crushed his nation’s hopes that its loyalty and suffering would be rewarded.

In Russia’s western provinces and the Ukraine, the Soviet authorities faced a problem unique in Europe: they sometimes had to deal with people nostalgic for the German occupation. All German administrators of occupied territory had been murderous to Jews and communists; many had treated the rest of the population as subhuman slaves. Some, however, especially in the regions adjoining the Baltic, had given small towns and villages their first experience of good administration. Peasants had had their land restored and the tithes they had to supply the German occupiers with were not unduly onerous. These memories had to be eradicated. The peace that came with Germany’s unconditional surrender in May 1945 was illusory east of the Elbe. Stalin turned his war machine on his own minorities, on eastern Europeans who sought to revive their pre-war independence and, as in the 1930s, on his own too buoyant intelligentsia and party. The bourgeois contagion that the Anglo-American alliance had brought had to be scrubbed out.

The Red Army, however, was stimulated to unsocialist behaviour by Stalin’s own policies. What remained of German industry and infrastructure was dismantled and sent back to the USSR as the beginning of war reparations. Not only industrial plant, but art galleries and museums were looted, sometimes recovering what the Germans had looted from the east. When Soviet soldiers raped German women and took German watches, bicycles, crockery and clothes, they were only imitating the state. Officers packed whole trains with loot: cars, dinner services, books, even herds of cattle for their dachas. Stalin said that he saw nothing wrong with rape, and he tolerated the massive looting, noting that if he had to arrest a senior Red Army officer he could now easily find a pretext. The criminalization of the Red Army began in 1945. The USSR was flooded with foreign currency and consumer goods: American aid, from Jeeps to second-hand shoes; German loot, from prize cattle to cameras. The black market, which had virtually vanished in the mid-1930s, reappeared. Nothing that Stalin or his successors threatened could kill it off. Likewise, the underworld, so badly damaged by Ezhov, thrived on post-war inequalities. The cities were infested with deserters, demobilized soldiers and thugs freed from the GULAG; in 1947 there were 10,000 murders and hundreds of thousands of violent robberies in the USSR.

Alliance with the Western democracies shook communist ideology
and brought about the rehabilitation of the Russian Orthodox Church. When Easter bells rang out, on Stalin’s orders, in Moscow in 1942, the effect was astounding. On 5 September Metropolitan Sergi, accompanied by two senior bishops, all wearing ordinary suits, and by Molotov and Vsevolod Merkulov, talked to Stalin while Beria, Malenkov and Mikoyan waited outside. The result was the restoration of Church property, generous funding and permission to print the Bible. Andrei Vyshinsky was entrusted with finding a censor who could purge the Bible of anti-Soviet sentiments. The choice fell on the dramatist Nikolai Virta, who was paid 500,000 roubles by the Church and declared both the Old and New Testaments to be completely in accord with party ideology.

The Church was now, like that of Ivan the Terrible or Henry VIII of England, an arm of the state. In Stalin’s first broadcast to the Soviet people after the outbreak of war, he had flabbergasted his listeners by addressing them not as ‘comrades’ but, like a Christian pastor, as ‘brothers and sisters’. Promoting Orthodoxy had been more effective in galvanizing the nation to fight than reiterating the slogans of Stalinism. Stalin may also have listened to an American envoy, who had pointed out that Congress would not hesitate to send the USSR military aid if religious suppression stopped. Right until Stalin’s death Russian metropolitan bishops were delivered in large black limousines to appear on international platforms, such as peace congresses, in the company of such stalwart atheists as Fadeev and Ehrenburg.

Russian intellectuals recalled reacting with relief to the outbreak of war. Some had hoped for defeat, hoping that Hitler would establish a puppet Russian state as tolerable as Vichy France; most longed for victory, forgetting that after every major victory the Russian state had tightened the screws. For rallying round, Soviet intellectuals expected gratitude, even though Stalin’s remark ‘Gratitude is a dog’s virtue’ was widely quoted. Even the peasantry assumed that Stalin would have to pay for Anglo-American support: rumours swept the country that Churchill and Roosevelt had demanded the abolition of collective farms as the price of help.

Writers, composers and painters had been treated with a care they were no longer used to. Very few were stranded in blockaded Leningrad; most were evacuated not to the Volga and Urals, where the government and heavy industry were relocated, but to the warmth and relative plenty
of central Asian cities such as Tashkent. Scarce resources were allocated to print poets such as Akhmatova and Pasternak. Symphonies were commissioned; public readings turned writers into stars. Those who reported from the front, such as Konstantin Simonov or Ilya Ehrenburg, were treated like party leaders. No major writer was imprisoned or shot, although the very few still alive in the GULAG were not released. Only Nikolai Zabolotsky, after Ilya Ehrenburg, Samuil Marshak and Nikolai Tikhonov wrote a letter to Beria in March 1945, was taken off heavy labour and given work as a draughtsman which would enable him to survive.

One major poet died a tragic death. Marina Tsvetaeva, lured back to Russia in 1939 despite Pasternak’s warnings of 1935, found herself a pariah. Her husband, one of Beria’s contract killers, was shot, her sister and daughter arrested as French spies, and she was barred from publishing. Evacuated with other writers to Elabuga near Kazan and starving in a garret, washing dishes in the canteen where favoured writers ate, she hanged herself. Almost her last poem is a reproach to her fellow poets, none of whom – not even the repentant Pasternak – had dared to be a good Samaritan:

And there is no coffin!

There is no separation!

The table’s spell is broken, the house is woken.

Like death to a marriage feast,

I am life that has come to a supper.

You are nobody to me: not brother, son, husband, or friend –

and still I reproach you:

you, who laid the table for six
souls
,

without giving me a seat at the far end.

Pasternak, who had once thought himself in love with Tsvetaeva, wrote a poem in her memory, which he dared in 1943 to read to audiences. Its grief is understated almost to the point of callousness:

In the silence of your departure there is an unexpressed reproach.

Losses are always enigmatic.

In the fruitless searches which are my reply

I agonise without result: death has no outlines.

Oh, Marina, it’s long been time, and not such a terrible trouble,

to transfer your neglected ashes from Elabuga in a requiem.

Returning to Moscow in spring 1943 by riverboat, Pasternak dared to write in the captain’s journal, ‘I want to have a bath and I also thirst for freedom of the press.’ The free speech of the writers was carefully recorded by those of their friends who reported to the NKVD. In 1943 and 1944 Vsevolod Merkulov collated the remarks for Stalin’s perusal.
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The most loyal communists had views that strangely anticipate those of many modern Russians: ‘… it’s an irony of fate that we are shedding blood and devastating our country in order to strengthen Anglo-American capitalism… So Hitlerism has played its historic role, for it has saved capitalism from death,’ remarked a literary critic, Boris Valbe. Others were more sanguine: the grandson of the great Maecenas Savva Morozov, a journalist who had by a miracle not paid for his ancestry with his life, declared, ‘it’s clear that after the war life in this country must change radically, under the Allies’ influence the government will be forced to make decisive changes internally. It’s very likely that opposition parties will emerge in the country’. In summer 1943 many writers believed that the generals who were winning the war – Zhukov and Rokossovsky – would gain such political clout that they could become dictators, that the returning soldier would demand the dissolution of collective farms and Soviet power.