Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

  During 1948, Stalin noticed that production rose in the last quarter of the year but dipped in the first quarter. This was a normal seasonal variation but Stalin asked Voznesensky to level it out. Voznesensky, who ran Gosplan, promised he would. However, he failed to do so and, afraid of Stalin, he concealed the statistics. Somehow this legerdemain was leaked to Beria who discovered that hundreds of secret Gosplan documents had gone missing. One night at Kuntsevo, Beria sprung it on Stalin, who, observed Mikoyan, “was astonished,” then “furious.”

  “Does it mean Voznesensky deceives the Politburo and tricks us like fools?”

  Beria then revealed the damning secret about Voznesensky that he had treasured ever since 1941: during Stalin’s breakdown, Voznesensky had told Molotov, “Vyacheslav, go forward, we’ll follow you!” That betrayal clinched it. Andreyev, that relentless bureaucratic killer, was brought in to investigate. Frantic, Voznesensky called Stalin but no one would receive him. Sacked from the Politburo on 7 March 1949, he spent his days at his Granovsky flat writing an economics treatise. Once again, that dread duo, Malenkov and Abakumov, took over the Gosplan Case.

  The other anointed heir was “young handsome” Kuznetsov, who had helped Zhdanov remove Malenkov in 1946 and replaced Beria as curator of the MGB, thus earning their hatred. Sincere and affable, Kuznetsov was the opposite of Voznesensky: virtually everyone liked him. But decency was relative at Stalin’s court: Kuznetsov had aided Zhdanov in anti-Semitic matters and forwarded Stalin a report on the sexual peccadilloes of Party officials. He worshipped Stalin, treasuring the note he had received from him during the war—yet he did not understand him. He made the mistake of examining old MGB files on Kirov’s murder and the show trials. Kuznetsov’s blundering into such sensitive matters aroused Stalin’s suspicions.

  Simultaneously, Malenkov alerted Stalin that the Leningrad Party had covered up a voting scandal and held a trade fair without government permission. He managed to connect these sins with a vague plan mooted by Zhdanov to create a Russian (as opposed to a Soviet) Party alongside the Soviet one and make Leningrad the Russian capital. These trivialities may hardly sound like crimes punishable by death but they masked the fault lines in the Soviet Imperium and Stalin’s dictatorship.285 Besides, a Russian Party could not be led by a Georgian. Stalin championed the Russian people as the binding force of the USSR but he remained an internationalist. Voznesensky’s nationalism worried the Caucasians: “For him not only Georgians and Armenians but even Ukrainians aren’t people,” Stalin told Mikoyan. Beria must have worried about his future under the Leningraders.

  Malenkov had shrewdly amassed a collage of mistakes that touched all Stalin’s sensitive places. “Go there and take a look at what’s going on,” Stalin ordered Malenkov and Abakumov who arrived in Leningrad with two trains carrying five hundred MGB officers and twenty investigators from the Sled-Chast, the department “to Investigate Especially Important Cases.” When “Stalin orders him to kill one,” Beria said, “Malenkov kills 1,000!” Malenkov attacked the local bosses, stringing together disparate strands into one lethal conspiracy. The arrests began, but Voznesensky and Kuznetsov lingered at their flats in the pink Granovsky block, convinced that Stalin would forgive them: 1937 seemed a long time ago. Even Mikoyan thought blood-letting was a thing of the past.

  He had reason to hope so because his youngest son Sergo, now eighteen, was engaged to Kuznetsov’s “charming, beautiful” daughter Alla.

  When her father fell, Alla gave Sergo the chance to avoid marrying an outcast: “Does it change your intentions?” But Sergo loved Alla and his parents had come to adore her “like our own daughter.” Mikoyan supported the marriage.

  “And you allow this marriage? Have you gone crazy?” the pusillanimous Kaganovich whispered to Mikoyan. “Don’t you understand that Kuznetsov’s doomed? Stop the marriage.” Mikoyan was adamant. On 15 February 1949, Kuznetsov was sacked as Party Secretary and accused of “non-Bolshevik deviation” and “anti-State” separatism. Three days later, the couple got married. Kuznetsov was cheerfully oblivious, “a courageous man,” thought Mikoyan, “with no idea of Stalin’s customs.” Mikoyan gave the couple a party at Zubalovo but Kuznetsov, finally realizing his plight, telephoned Mikoyan to say he could not come because he had an “upset stomach.”

  Mikoyan would not hear of it: “We’ve enough lavatories in the house! Come!”

  “I’ve no car,” answered Kuznetsov. “You do better without me.”

  “It’s indecent for a father to miss his daughter’s wedding,” retorted Mikoyan who sent his limousine.286 At the party, Kuznetsov could not relax. He felt he was endangering his daughter.

  “I feel unwell,” he said, “so let’s drink to our children!” Then he left.

  That dangerous spring, poor Kuznetsov attended another Politburo marriage that involved the beleagured Zhdanov faction. “Stalin had always wanted me to marry Svetlana,” recalls Yury Zhdanov, still at the Central Committee. “We were childhood friends so it wasn’t daunting.” But marrying a dictator’s daughter was not so straightforward: Yury was not sure to whom he should propose, the dictator or the daughter.

  He went to Stalin, who tried to dissuade him: “You don’t know her character. She’ll show you the door in no time.” But Yury persisted. “Stalin didn’t give any lectures but told me that he trusted me to look after Svetlana,” says Yury.

  Stalin now played matchmaker, according to Sergo Beria: “I like that man,” Stalin told Svetlana. “He has a future and he loves you. Marry him.”

  “He made his declaration of love to you?” she retorted. “He’s never looked at me.”

  “Talk to him and you’ll see,” said Stalin.

  Svetlana still loved Sergo Beria and told him: “You didn’t want me? Right, I’ll marry Yury Zhdanov.”

  However, she became fond of “my pious Yurochka” and they agreed to marry. But “my second marriage was the choice of my father,” explained Svetlana, “and I was tired of struggling so went through with it.”

  The Generalissimo did not attend the wedding party at the Zhdanovs’ dacha seven miles beyond Zubalovo along the Uspenskoye Road. The guests included another Politburo couple: Natasha, the daughter of Andreyev and Dora Khazan, was there with her husband, Vladimir Kuibyshev, the son of the late magnate. “There were also schoolmates . . . from comparatively ordinary families too,” remembers Stepan Mikoyan who was also a guest. Then there was dancing and a feast: Yury, like his father, played the piano. It was natural that Kuznetsov was there because he had been Zhdanov’s closest ally but everyone knew he was under a cloud.

  Yury and Svetlana, along with her son Joseph Morozov, now aged four, lived with Zhdanov’s widow in the Kremlin. “I never saw my own father,” Joseph recalled. “I called Yury ‘Daddy.’ Yury loved me!”

  A few days later, they were visiting Zubalovo when Vlasik called: Stalin was on his way. “What do you want to move to the Zhdanovs’ for?” he asked her. “You’ll be eaten alive by the women there. There are too many women in that house.” He wanted the young couple to move into Kuntsevo, adding a second floor but in his maladroit way he could not ask directly and probably did not want to be bothered.

  Svetlana remained with the prissy widows of Zhdanov and Shcherbakov: soon she loathed her mother-in-law Zinaida who combined “Party bigotry” with “bourgeois complacency.” Her marriage was not loving: “the lesson I learned was never to go into marriage as a deal.” Sexually it was, in her words, “not a great success.” She never forgave Zinaida Zhdanova for telling her that her mother had been “mad.” However, they had a daughter, Katya, though Svetlana was so ill during the birth that she wrote to her father saying she felt abandoned and was delighted to receive his brusque reply.287

  Besides, the wedding was not well timed for the Zhdanovs. Kuznetsov and Voznesensky were on the edge of the precipice. Yury sensed the Leningrad Affair “was undoubtedly aimed at my father” but “I wasn’t afraid then. I discovered later I should have been destro
yed . . .” He was right: the prisoners were later tortured to implicate Zhdanov.

  Stalin mulled over Kuznetsov’s fate. Poskrebyshev invited the Leningrader to dinner at Kuntsevo but Stalin refused to shake his hand: “I didn’t summon you.” Kuznetsov “seemed to shrink.” Stalin expected a letter of self-criticism from Kuznetsov but the naïve Leningrader did not send one. “It means he’s guilty,” Stalin muttered to Mikoyan.

  Yet Stalin had doubts. “Isn’t it a waste not letting Vosnesensky work while we’re deciding what to do with him?” he asked Malenkov and Beria who said nothing. Then Stalin remembered that Air Marshal Novikov and Shakhurin were still in jail.

  “Don’t you think it’s time to release them?” But again the duo said nothing, whispering in the bathroom that if they released Shakhurin and Novikov, “it might spread to the others”—the Leningraders. While he considered these matters of life and death, Stalin drove off to his dacha at Semyonovskoe, passing on the way a queue of bedraggled citizens waiting in the rain at a bus stop. Stalin stopped the car and ordered his bodyguards to offer the people a lift but they were afraid.

  “You don’t know how to talk to people,” growled Stalin, climbing out and ushering them into the limousine. He told them about the death of his son Yakov and a little girl told him of the death of her father. Afterwards Stalin sent her a school uniform and a satchel. Three weeks later, he ordered Abakumov to arrest, torture and destroy the Leningraders who had only recently been his anointed successors.1

  On 13 August, Kuznetsov was summoned to Malenkov’s office. “I’ll be back,” he told his wife and son Valery. “Don’t start supper without me.” The boy watched him head down Granovsky towards the Kremlin: “He turned and waved at me. It was the last time I ever saw him,” says Valery. He was arrested by Malenkov’s bodyguard.

  Yet Stalin hesitated about Voznesensky, whose arrest would leave him in the hands of Malenkov and Beria. Stalin still invited him to Kuntsevo for the usual dinners and talked of appointing him to the State Bank. On 17 August, Voznesensky wrote pathetically to Stalin, begging for work: “It’s hard to be apart from one’s comrades . . . I understand the lesson of Party-mindedness . . . I ask you to show me trust,” signing it, “Devoted to you.” Stalin sent the letter to Malenkov. The duo kept up the pressure. The ailing but drear Andreyev exposed all manner of “disorders in this organization”: 526 documents had gone missing from Gosplan. This invented case was one of Andreyev’s last achievements. Voznesensky admitted he had not prosecuted the culprits because there were “no facts . . . Now I understand . . . I was guilty.” Khrushchev later accused Malenkov of “whispering to Stalin” to make sure Voznesensky was exterminated. “What!” Malenkov replied. “That I was managing Stalin? You must be joking!” Stalin was unmanageable but highly suggestible: he remained in absolute command.

  Four months later, Voznesensky was arrested in this sweep of Zhdanovites, joining Kuznetsov and 214 other prisoners who were tortured in a frenzy of “French wrestling.” Brothers, wives and children followed them into the maw of Abakumov’s MGB. Kuznetsov was thrashed so badly his eardrums were perforated. “I was beaten until the blood came out of my ears,” one prisoner, Turko, testified after Stalin’s death. “Komarov smashed my head against the wall.” Turko implicated Kuznetsov.

  The torturers asked Abakumov if they should beat prisoner Zakrizhevskaya who was pregnant: “You’re defending her?” bellowed Abakumov. “The law doesn’t ban it. Get on with your business!”

  She was tortured and miscarried: “Tell us everything,” the torturers told her. “We’re the vanguard of the Party!”

  The fallen vanguard, Kuznetsov and Voznesensky, were held in a Special Prison on Matrosskaya Tishina Street set up by Malenkov who arrived incognito with Beria and the Politburo to interrogate the prisoners.

  The sinisterly genial Bulganin, who was also under threat, was given the duty of interrogating his old friend, Voznesensky’s brother, Alexander, who had been Rector of Leningrad University. When the prisoner saw him, he thought he was saved: “He rushed to me,” Bulganin admitted later, “and cried, ‘Comrade Bulganin, my dear, at last! I’m not guilty. It’s great you’ve come! Now Comrade Stalin will learn the truth!’ ”

  Bulganin snarled back at his erstwhile friend: “The Tambov wolf’s your friend,” a Russian saying that meant “no friend of yours.” Bulganin felt he had no choice: “What could I do?” he whined. “I knew Beria and Malenkov sat in the corner and watched me.” Like all of Stalin’s cases, the guilt was elastic and could be extended on his whim: Molotov, who was close to Voznesensky, was vaguely implicated too.

  By the time Kuznetsov’s daughter Alla and her new husband Sergo Mikoyan rushed back from their honeymoon, just days later, her father had already been beaten into a signed confession. Anastas Mikoyan received his daughter-in-law in his Kremlin study. “It was very hard for me to speak to Alla,” wrote Mikoyan. “Of course I had to tell her the official version.” Alla ran out sobbing.

  “I ran to follow,” Sergo recalls, “afraid she’d kill herself.”288 Mikoyan called back Sergo and showed him Kuznetsov’s confession, which Stalin had distributed. Sergo did not believe the charges.

  “Every page is signed,” said Mikoyan.

  “I’m sure the case will clear up and he’ll return,” replied Sergo.

  “I couldn’t tell him,” wrote Mikoyan, “that Kuznetsov’s fate was already predetermined by Stalin. He would never return.” 2

  The Leningrad Case was not Beria’s only success: just after Kuznetsov’s arrest in late August 1949, Beria set out in a special armoured train for a secret nuclear settlement amid the Kazakh steppes. Beria was frantic with worry because if things went wrong, “we would,” as one of his managers put it, “all have to give an answer before the people.” Beria’s family would be destroyed. Malenkov comforted him.

  Beria arrived in Semipalatinsk-21 for the test of the “article.” He moved into a tiny cabin beside Professor Kurchatov’s command post. On the morning of 29 August, Beria watched as a crane lowered the uranium tamper into position on its carriage; the plutonium hemisphere was placed within it. The explosives and the initiator were in place. The “article” was then wheeled out into the night onto a platform where it would be raised to the top of the tower. Beria and the scientists left.

  At 6 p.m., they assembled in the command post ten kilometres away with its control panel and telephones to Moscow, all behind an earthen wall to deflect the shock wave. Kurchatov ordered detonation. There was a bright flash. After the shock wave had passed, they hurried outside to admire the mushroom cloud rising majestically before them.

  Beria was wildly excited and kissed Kurchatov on the forehead but he kept asking, “Did it look like the American one? We didn’t screw up? Kurchatov isn’t pulling our leg, is he?” He was very relieved to hear that the destruction at the site was apocalyptic. “It would have been a great misfortune if this hadn’t worked out,” he said. He hurried to the telephone to ring Stalin, to be the first to tell him. But when he rang, Stalin replied crushingly that he already knew and hung up. Stalin had his own sources. Beria punched the general who had dared tell Stalin first, shouting, “You’ve put a spoke in my wheel, traitor; I’ll grind you to pulp.” But he was hugely proud of his “colossal achievement.” Four years after Hiroshima, Stalin had the Bomb.

  Beria had another reason to be happy: he had met a good-looking woman named Drozhdova whose husband worked in the Kremlin. He may have had an affair with her before she introduced him to her daughter, Lilya, only fourteen but already a “blue-eyed, long-legged paragon of Russian beauty with long blonde plaits,” recalls Martha Peshkova. Beria was entranced: “his last great love.” The mother wanted all the benefits: “Don’t let him do it until you’ve got a flat, car, dacha,” she said to Lilya, according to Peshkova.

  Beria set her up in style. Nina Beria tolerated this affair but in the summer when she and Martha were in Gagra, her husband entertained Lilya at the dacha. “The whole
of Moscow knew,” says Martha. Beria and Malenkov were riding high but it turned out that someone else would benefit most from the power vacuum left by the Leningraders.

  Stalin summoned Khrushchev from Kiev. “I couldn’t help but feel anxious,” he admitted, when Kuznetsov and Voznesensky were being tortured. He called Malenkov who comforted him: “Don’t worry. I can’t tell you now why you’ve been called but I promise you’ve got nothing to fear.”

  Khrushchev had governed the Ukraine since 1938, ruthlessly purging the kulaks before the war, crushing the Ukrainian nationalists, ordering the assassinations of Uniate bishops afterwards and, in February 1948, organizing the expulsion of “harmful elements” from villages: almost a million were arrested on Khrushchev’s initiative, a colossal crime which approached the deportation of the kulaks in brutality and scale. Small wonder that in retirement, he reflected, “I’m up to my elbows in blood.” Apart from the short period in 1947 when Stalin sent Kaganovich to replace him in Kiev, Khrushchev, “vital, pigheaded, jolly” but now bald and almost spherical in shape, was an enduring favourite. His plain speaking made his sycophancy sound genuine. Stalin regarded this dynamic cannonball of a man as a semi-literate peasant— “Khrushchev’s as ignorant as the Negus of Ethiopia,” he told Malenkov. Yet he did not completely underestimate his “deep naturalness, pure masculinity, tenacious cunning, common sense and strength of character.”

  “With him,” Stalin reflected, “you need a short leash.” When Khrushchev arrived in Moscow, he hurried to Beria’s house for further reassurance. There was a growing solidarity among Stalin’s courtiers. Beria comforted him too.

  Stalin appointed Khrushchev CC Secretary and Moscow boss but confided, “things aren’t going very well . . . We’ve exposed a conspiracy in Leningrad. And Moscow’s teeming with anti-Party elements.” He wanted Khrushchev to “check it out.” As the Leningrad Case showed, the system encouraged Terror entrepreneurialism. The magnates could either douse a case or inflame it into a massacre: it was then up to Stalin to decide whether to protect the victims, save the evidence for later or slaughter them immediately.