Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

Lidiya Shatunovskaya, a graduate student of the State Institute of Theater Arts, and her husband, the well-known physicist Lev Tumerman, were among the friends of Yevgeniya Allilueva arrested in December 1947 (Documents 6 and 7, Appendix II). Shatunovskaya was an adopted daughter of Petr Krasikov, an Old Bolshevik, member of the Central Executive Committee, and deputy chairman of the Supreme Court. Her first husband was a high-ranking Soviet administrator. Later, Shatunovskaya described in detail how the Allilueva case quickly became purely anti-Semitic, especially after the murder of the actor and head of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) Solomon Mikhoels on January 13, 1948, by MGB agents. The JAC was a Jewish organization created in 1942 by Soviet authorities that coordinated the anti-Fascist activity of Soviet Jews and successfully disseminated in the United States information about the Nazi atrocities against the Jews on the territories occupied by the Nazis. 223On the personal order of Stalin, Abakumov organized the killing of Mikhoels and an MGB agent, Vladimir Golubov-Potapov, in Minsk, the capital of Belorussia. The operation was under personal supervision of first deputy MGB minister Sergei Ogol’tsov, Belorussian MGB minister Lavrentii Tsanava (one of the main henchmen of Lavrentii Beria, the main organizer of the Soviet state security system), and head of one of the departments within the Second (Counterintelligence) Department, Fyodor Shubnyakov. 224

“We will exterminate all Jews in prisons and camps,” Vladimir Komarov, one of the most brutal MGB investigators, told Shatunovskaya during interrogations in 1948. 225Being “tall, stout, with round shoulders and a short neck,” 226Komarov “specialized” in beatings and torturing prisoners during interrogations. In the late 1940s–early 1950s, there were two special rooms for torture in Lubyanka Prison: Room No. 31 (known as the one used for “preliminary torture”) and Room No. 4, where Komarov “worked.” 227But the main tortures were in Lefortovo Prison. “My most terrifying memoirs are about the nights when I was forced to sit on a stool in an investigation cell next to Komarov’s office,” Shatunovskaya recalled. “All night long I heard blows by a [rubber] truncheon and shrieks, shrieks… From time to time Komarov rushed into the room, his eyes were red, grasped me from the stool, shook me and roared: “Do you hear? We will treat you the same way!” 228

Komarov was absolutely cynical and extremely sadistic, but rather clever. 229However, this high-ranking MGB officer could hardly write. Later, during his own interrogation (Komarov was arrested in 1951 after the arrest of MGB minister Abakumov), Komarov testified:

Abakumov frequently told me that… I could not write at all. Honestly, I’d like to confess he was right, since writing testimonies of the arrested persons was a weak point [in our work] because all of us [i.e., MGB investigators] were semiliterate. 230

Komarov reported the results of the “interrogations” of Shatunovskaya to Stalin directly, and Stalin gave instructions on how to torture the victim. Komarov yelled at Shatunovskaya: “This is Party and State politics!… We will destroy the so-called Jewish culture, and all of you, the Zionists, will be exterminated. All of you!” During the late 1940s–early 1950s, anti-Semitism was used by Soviet MGB interrogators not only in Moscow but also in the countries of Eastern Europe. In Prague, another notorious MGB investigator, Mikhail Likhachev (like Komarov, Likhachev was deputy head of the MGB Department for Investigation of Especially Important Cases [OVD]), who was in charge of organizing the infamous Slansky show trial, told one of the arrested high-ranking Communists, Eugen Loebl, during the interrogation in 1949: “You are not a Communist, and you are not a Czechoslovak. You are a dirty Jew, that’s what you are. Israel is your only real fatherland, and you have sold out Socialism to your bosses, the Zionist, imperialist leaders of world Jewry. Let me tell you: the time is approaching fast when we’ll have to exterminate all your kind.” 231

Both Shatunovskaya and her husband were later put in Vladimir Prison (Documents 6 and 7, Appendix II). They were released after Stalin’s death, but Tumerman had scars for the rest of his life from the terrible torture he received during Komarov’s interrogations. From her ordeal as a prisoner, Shatunovskaya had a damaged spinal column and arm and leg joints, as well as a weak heart and bad sight. During his imprisonment, another physicist published the results of Tumerman’s scientific studies under his own name. After his release, Tumerman worked at the Institute of Molecular Biology until he and his family emigrated to Israel. 232

Rebecca Levina (1899–1964), an aged economist and corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, was also arrested in 1948 in connection with the Allilueva case. 233Before that, in December 1947, her coworker, also an economist (and senior scientist) Isaak Goldstein (1892–1953) had been arrested together with his wife (without a prosecutor’s sanction). Unfortunately for him, in the 1920s he had worked with Yevgeniya Allilueva at the Soviet Commercial Office in Berlin. Now he became a key person in the Allilueva case and fell into the hands of Abakumov and his professional torturers.

During the first interrogations, Levina insisted that she was innocent. The investigators, Colonels Georgii Sorokin and Mikhail Likhachev, used sleep deprivation and lengthy “standing” interrogations that usually ended when Levina fainted, fell down, and was then cruelly beaten. The investigators broke the old lady’s front teeth. They struck her body with a rubber baton on the buttocks, legs, back, and genitals. After this, Levina finally “confessed.”

On May 29, 1948, all of the eleven or twelve members of the Allilueva case were sentenced by a special MGB council (the OSO) to ten to twenty-five years’ imprisonment. Two friends of Yevgeniya Allilueva, a married couple named Zaitsev, were convicted as “American spies” to twenty-five years’ imprisonment. 234Before his arrest, Vitalii Zaitsev, a lawyer and employee of the Foreign Ministry, worked at the American Embassy in Moscow. This was enough to consider him a spy. Maryana Zaitseva’s mother, Tatyana Fradkina, received “only” ten years. 235All three of them were put in Vladimir Prison, where they were kept in solitary confinement. Fradkina died on January 7, 1951. Levina got ten years in Vladimir (Document 8, Appendix II). Goldstein was tried by the OSO separately, on October 29, 1949, and condemned to twenty-five years’ imprisonment as a spy; as with the others, he was put in Vladimir Prison (Document 9, Appendix II). He died there on October 30, 1953, after Stalin’s death, while waiting for a reevaluation of his case.

As for Svetlana Stalina’s Jewish husband Grigory Moroz, Stalin simply told Svetlana: “You cannot be Morozov’s wife any more. Today he must leave [our apartment in] the Kremlin… I know you love him and do not want him to be chained to a prison wheelbarrow [in a mine].” 236Soon, on Stalin’s order, Svetlana married Yurii Zhdanov without divorcing Moroz. Yurii was a son of one of the main Party leaders of the time, Andrei Zhdanov. As I will describe in Chapter 4, in 1948 Yurii Zhdanov played an important role in the Lysenko affair.

In 1953, Levina was transferred from Vladimir Prison to a mental prison hospital in Kazan widely known for its especially harsh regime (later, in the 1960s–1970s, many dissidents were put into this “hospital”). In 1939, NKVD commissar Beria ordered the transfer of Kazan Psychiatric Hospital under NKVD control. On July 13, 1945, NKVD deputy commissar Vasilii Chernyshov issued special regulations for the NKVD doctors and prisoners of the NKVD Kazan Psychiatric Prison Hospital (KTPH). In the 1940s–1950s, convicts were sent to the KTPH for enforced treatment following the decision of a court (criminal cases) or the OSO (political cases). 237After “treatment” at Kazan Hospital, Levina was released, by that time completely insane.