Stalin and His Hangmen (73 page)

Riumin worked slowly, too slowly for Ignatiev’s composure or Stalin’s pleasure. However dim, Riumin knew that once the case was over, he would be disposable; he was in no hurry to conclude interrogations. He took a year to extract statements that Abakumov had framed the aviation minister in order to embarrass Malenkov, that he was in league with the Leningrad renegades whom he had sent to their deaths, that he was planning a
coup d’état
. All Riumin lacked was proof that Abakumov was a Jew. By April 1952, Abakumov, still refusing to confess, was a cripple and Riumin risked killing him if torture continued. Riumin nevertheless indicted him on 3 November 1952 as the leader of the MGB’s Jewish nationalists. Eleven days later, Stalin, after angrily pencilling comments on Abakumov’s half-hearted confessions, dismissed Riumin and sent him to join the other failed state security ministers among the accountants at the Ministry of State Control.

It was now Ignatiev’s chance to shine, but he preferred his desk to visiting the Lubianka. Stalin roared at him, ‘You want to keep your hands clean, do you? You can’t. Have you forgotten Lenin ordered Fanny Kaplan to be shot? and Dzierżyński said Savinkov had to be annihilated. If you’re going to be squeamish, I’ll smash your face in. If you don’t do what I tell you you’ll be in a cell next to Abakumov’s.’
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Ignatiev had a heart attack. When he recovered, he moved Abakumov to Butyrki prison, to a cell surrounded by five empty cells. A guard and a doctor watched Abakumov, who was beaten a little less violently than the Jewish doctors and the recalcitrant MGB officers.

Yet more astonishing arrests were made: General Vlasik, Stalin’s confidant, chief bodyguard and tutor to his children, had been dismissed in spring 1952 for squirrelling away dinner plates and caviar, and carousing
with loose women. He was arrested in the autumn. Not even a dog could have been more devoted than Vlasik. Was Stalin demented? And, if so, could Beria and Malenkov now seize power?

Stalin’s End

… he worried as he felt all power ebbing from him – then Stalin
was just Soso Jughashvili, a simple Georgian. He recalled far – away
Georgia, of which he retained just the taste of turkey in walnuts,
the taste of Kakhetian wine, the song ‘Live ten thousand years’ and
the Georgian curse:
magati deda ki vatire
, ‘I shall make their mothers weep’.

Grigol Robakidze,
The Murdered Soul

Dementia explains Stalin’s decision to add his own doctor Vladimir Vinogradov, an ethnic Russian despite gossip his real name was Weintraub, to the Jewish doctors’ conspiracy. On 19 January 1952 Vinogradov examined Stalin for the last time and advised him, in view of his arteriosclerosis, to stop working. Stalin sent a note to Beria: ‘Sort out Vinogradov’, and along with fourteen other Kremlin doctors, not all of whom were Jewish, he was arrested. Lidia Timashuk was interrogated and awarded a medal. Vlasik was accused jointly with Abakumov of suppressing Lidia Timashuk’s warning of the incompetence of the Kremlin doctors, something which Stalin himself had in effect done.

Abakumov was in a bad way. Goglidze, working for Ignatiev as happily as he had for Ezhov, Beria, Abakumov and Riumin, accepted a doctor’s report: ‘Prisoner No. 15 seems to have heart disease and can be interrogated no more than 3–4 hours and only in daytime… if necessary, urgent medicine can be given to restore his health so that he can be actively interrogated when acute methods have to be used.’ Abakumov’s interrogator now wanted to know why he had not warned Stalin that Tito was splitting Yugoslavia from the communist bloc. The question was ridiculous: Stalin himself had given Tito a series of ultimatums in 1947 and 1948, demanding that he subordinate Yugoslavia’s foreign and domestic policies to the USSR. Stalin had underestimated Tito’s enormous ego and the strength of his army and secret police; when
Yugoslavia broke away from the Soviet bloc in summer 1948, it was not for want of intelligence from Abakumov.

Leaving Abakumov to stew, Stalin had the Kremlin doctors handcuffed and tortured. Riumin carried this out in the Lubianka, in a specially equipped room. The interrogators explained, ‘We don’t use red-hot iron rods. But we do thrash people.’ The doctors understood pain only too well. Some quickly confessed to killing not only Zhdanov but the Bulgarian communist Dimitrov, the French Maurice Thorez, and even to harming Stalin’s children. One doctor claimed that he had learnt euthanasia from Dr Pletniov’s killing of Gorky. They were told that they would be hanged unless they said which plotters they were working for.
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Dr Meer Vovsi, a cousin of Mikhoels, confessed to being simultaneously a Nazi and a British agent, even though the Nazis had killed his family. Vinogradov and Vovsi, the indictment concluded, meant first to poison Stalin, Beria and Malenkov, and then fire on their limousines.

Stalin was so absorbed in the Jewish doctors’ plot that he took no break at all in 1952. His paranoia accelerated as his physical health declined, and in February 1953 he dismissed his secretary and last real devotee Poskriobyshev, who had not even complained when Stalin had his Polish-Jewish wife shot. On 1 December 1952 Stalin made his last speech to the Presidium of the Central Committee. As usual, he said that the more successful the party, the more enemies would sabotage it. He called Jews agents of American intelligence, warned that many were doctors, and then turned on the MGB: ‘They’ve admitted themselves that they are sitting in dung.’ In eastern Europe the inevitable finale to the Kremlin doctors’ plot was being rehearsed: eleven alleged Zionists in the Czechoslovak party were hanged on 3 December 1952 for using doctors to shorten their leader’s life. On 9 January 1953
Pravda
featured a sensational headline: ‘Murderers in White Gowns’. Jews would now be tried on a wave of public panic and hatred. Twenty-eight more doctors were arrested, and nine spouses.

Rumours of a massive pogrom raged among Moscow’s anti-Semites, Jews and diplomats. In the MGB Goglidze collected these rumours: after the doctors had been hanged in Red Square, 400,000 Jews would be deported to Siberia to ‘save’ them from the people’s wrath; cattle wagons were ready in Moscow’s railway marshalling yards. There was no basis for any of this: the railway archives show no deportation preparations,
and even a senile Stalin would have forbidden anything as spontaneous as a pogrom. However, a letter to
Pravda
was prepared, and sixty prominent Jews were told to sign it – they included the physicist Landau, the poet Marshak, the novelist Vasili Grossman and the film director Mikhail Romm. The signatories demanded the eradication of ‘Jewish bourgeois nationalists’ and ‘spies and enemies of the Russian people’. Kaganovich chose to sign a separate version of the letter. Ilya Ehrenburg signed only after writing to Stalin to warn him that the letter might ‘confuse people who are not yet aware that there is no Jewish nation’.
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Seven weeks before his fatal stroke Stalin lost interest in the whole fabrication, and it fell apart before he was declared dead on 5 March. Most of the doctors were lucky: two died under torture, but the others, physically and psychologically traumatized, were released a few weeks later by Beria. None of Stalin’s heirs was in such good health that they could afford to alienate the country’s leading medical consultants.

The Jewish anti-fascists were less fortunate: their interrogators such as P. I. Grishaev, a polyglot lawyer, were fresh from the Nuremberg trials. Some were beaten to death by the ‘choppers’ while Grishaev wrote up his doctoral dissertation; others were executed by Abakumov in November 1950.
²⁶
The rest were saved for trial, and Yitzhak Fefer was even produced in the Hotel Metropol when the American singer Paul Robeson came to Moscow and asked to see him. Fourteen, including Fefer, Peretz Markish and Academician Lina Shtern, survived long enough to be tried in secret, with neither defence nor prosecutor but with ‘expert’ witnesses and at surprising length – from 11 to 18 July 1952. The trial was held in the secret-police Dzierżyński club room inside the Lubianka. The judge, Cheptsov, later claimed to have had doubts about his verdicts, which he attributed to Abakumov’s, Riumin’s and Grishaev’s incompetence rather than the defendants’ innocence. Fefer acted as bellwether; others spoke defiantly, but all were shot except Lina Shtern, the sole survivor to tell the tale.

Even Beria’s power seemed to be waning. After 1949, when the atom bomb had been tested and Soviet physicists were at work on the world’s first hydrogen bomb, Beria had time to spend in Stalin’s company at the Kuntsevo dacha and in Sochi. However, as Stalin aged, his nocturnal meetings became shorter and he now rarely saw Beria without Malenkov, Mikoyan or Molotov. Stalin told Beria to replace the Georgian household
at his dacha with Russians. In autumn 1951, while on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus, Stalin brought a party commission to Georgia to arrest Beria’s Mingrelians in the party for bribery and nationalism. Worse for Beria was the next wave of arrests: Gegechkoris – relatives of Beria’s wife – and at least one of his mistresses were caught in the net. Teimuraz Shavdia, a son of the family which had brought up Nina Beria – Gegechkori, was sentenced to twenty-five years in the GULAG. Shavdia had deserted from the Red Army and fought with the Nazi SS before joining the French Maquis; inexplicably, he had been living openly in Tbilisi.

Beria’s subordinates sensed his power ebbing and helped Ignatiev and Stalin undermine him. After Beria’s appointee Rapava fell, an eastern Georgian, General Nikolai Rukhadze, took over the Georgian MGB. He dined with Stalin at Sochi and was told to report direct. Rukhadze, like Riumin, disappointed Stalin: he boasted to his cronies of privileges but was uninventive. He alleged that Beria was Jewish but could not follow up Beria’s connections with Georgian émigrés in Paris. Nevertheless, a Politbiuro resolution of 9 November 1951 named a Gegechkori as the target of American intelligence. On 27 March 1952 another Politbiuro resolution did more damage: Kandid Charkviani, to whom Beria had entrusted the Georgian party, was replaced by another eastern Georgian, Akaki Mgeladze.
²⁷
Apart from Beria only one other Mingrelian still retained power outside Georgia: Lavrenti Tsanava in Belorussia, the murderer of Mikhoels. He too was dismissed in June 1952. Lastly, Stalin threw out Beria’s sole ally in the Red Army, its chief of staff General Sergei Shtemenko, who had with Beria held the Caucasian passes against the Germans. By June 1952 Beria was cowed. Thousands of Mingrelians were arrested and their language was banned from official use. Before 1952 Georgians had represented less than 1 per cent of the population of the GULAG although they were 2 per cent of the population of the USSR; the Mingrelian affair rectified this anomaly.
²⁸

Rukhadze very quickly overreached himself: Stalin transferred Georgian state security to another candidate and brought Rukhadze to Moscow where ‘his fate will be decided’.
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Beria’s fawning now grated on Stalin, but he was irreplaceable. Few others, certainly neither Riumin nor Rukhadze, met Stalin’s essential criteria: ‘clever, active and strong’. Only Andrei Vyshinsky approached
Beria in Stalin’s esteem. Since 1949 Vyshinsky had been no less intransigent and rather more eloquent a minister of foreign affairs than Molotov. Vyshinsky’s part in the judicial murders of the 1930s was notorious, but the disgust he inspired at international conferences was in Stalin’s eyes an asset. MGB men looked down on Vyshinsky as ‘the Menshevik’, but Vyshinsky was important enough for his Kremlin office, like Stalin’s, to have a telephone which let him monitor all calls in the complex.
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Even Vyshinsky must have blanched when Stalin gave a rambling ninety-minute speech to the Central Committee on 16 October 1952. One by one, Stalin berated his closest associates in tones that had always presaged a fall. The unsinkable Mikoyan – ‘from one Ilyich [Lenin] to the other [Brezhnev] without heart attack or paralysis’ – for once turned pale. Stalin damned Molotov: ‘What about Molotov’s offer to hand the Crimea to the Jews?… Comrade Molotov respects his spouse so much that hardly have we in the Politbiuro taken a decision on an important political question than it quickly becomes known to Comrade Zhemchuzhina… Clearly such behaviour by a member of the Politbiuro is impermissible.’

Even as Stalin railed in Moscow his puppets in Budapest, Prague, Bucharest and Sofia were carrying out his instructions. Stalin had insisted on purges in eastern Europe partly because he was furious at the failure of the MGB to destroy Tito. Stalin had said, ‘I have only to move my little finger, and Tito is finished,’ only to find Tito and his security minister Rankovicć more than a match for him. East European leaders who thought Stalin and Molotov too intransigent towards Tito – all but the Hungarians and Albanians were slow to follow Stalin’s line – were branded Titoist, Trotskyist and Zionist. In Tirana, Enver Hoxha, supervised by an MGB officer, was the first to mete out a death sentence: in June 1949 Koci Xoxe, the Albanian Beria, was shot.

Władysław Gomułka, the Polish general secretary who had spent the war underground, was too soft. Stalin had Bierut remove Gomułka, who eventually accepted an invitation to see Stalin at Kuntsevo in December 1948 and managed to charm him. Gomułka kept his life and liberty, even though Stalin and Ogoltsov had forty state security men preparing a dossier.