Simon Montefiore - Stalin

“Beria was scared to death of Abakumov and tried at all costs to have good relations…” recalled Merkulov. “Beria met his match in Abakumov.” Like a rat on a sinking ship, Beria’s pimp Colonel Sarkisov denounced the sexual degeneracy of the Bolshevik “Bluebeard” to Abakumov who eagerly took it to Stalin: “Bring me everything this arsehole will write down!” snapped Stalin.

Abakumov, tall with a heart-shaped, fleshy face, colourless eyes, blue-black hair worn broussant, pouting lips and heavy eyebrows, was another colourful, swaggering torturer, amoral condottiere and “zoological careerist” who possessed all Beria’s sadism but less of his intelligence. [256] Abakumov appears as the consummate cunning courtier, utterly submissive to Stalin’s mysterious whims, in Solzhenitsyn’s novel of the post-war Terror, The First Circle , and as a shrewd and debauched secret-police careerist in Rybakov’s Fire and Ashes , the last volume of his Children of the Arbat trilogy. Abakumov unrolled a blood-stained carpet on his office floor before embarking on the torture of his victims in order not to stain his expensive Persian rugs. “You see,” he told his spy Leopold Trepper, “there are only two ways to thank an agent: cover his chest with medals or cut off his head.” He was hardly alone in this Bolshevik view.

Until Stalin swooped down to make him his own Chekist, Victor Abakumov was a typical secret policeman who had won his spurs purging Rostov in 1938. Born in 1908 to a Moscow worker, he was a bon viveur and womanizer. During the war, he stashed his mistresses in the Moskva Hotel and imported trainloads of plunder from Berlin. His splendid apartment had belonged to a soprano whom he had arrested and he regularly used MGB safehouses for amorous assignations. He loved jazz. The band-leader Eddie Rosner played at his parties until jazz was banned.

Abakumov dealt directly with Stalin, seeing him weekly, but never joined the dining circle: “I did nothing on my own,” he claimed after Stalin’s death. “Stalin gave orders and I carried them out.” There is no reason to disbelieve him. He cultivated Stalin’s children. At one Kremlin dinner, “he suddenly started, jumped up and obsequiously inclined his head before a short and reddish-haired girl”—Svetlana Stalin. Stalin’s grandeur was such that people now bowed to his daughter. Abakumov went drinking with Vasily Stalin. Together, they fanned the Aviators’ Case. Vasily purloined Novikov’s dacha while the “father of the Soviet air force” was tortured. Stalin asked for Abakumov’s recommendations:

“They should be shot.”

“It’s easy to shoot people,” replied Stalin. “It’s more difficult to make them work. Make them work.” Shakhurin received seven years’ hard labour, Novikov ten years—but their confessions implicated bigger fish.

On 4 May, Malenkov was abruptly removed from the Secretariat. His family remembered that they had to move out of their dacha. Their mother took them on a long holiday to the Baltic. Malenkov was despatched to check the harvest in Central Asia for several months, but never arrested. Beria tried to persuade Stalin to bring him back, which amused the Generalissimo: “Why are you taking such trouble with that imbecile? You’ll be the first to be betrayed by him.”

Beria had lost his Organs and his ally, Malenkov, so the success of the Bomb was paramount. Later in the year, he rushed to Elektrostal at Noginsk, near Moscow, to see Professor Kurchatov’s experimental nuclear reactor go critical, creating the first Soviet self-sustaining nuclear reaction. Beria watched Kurchatov raise the control rod at the panel and listened to the clicks that registered the neutrons rise to a wail.

“It’s started!” they said.

“Is that all?” barked Beria, afraid of being tricked by these eggheads. “Nothing more? Can I go to the reactor?” This would have been a delicious prospect for millions of Beria’s victims but they dutifully restrained him, so helping to preserve the diminished Beria.

The reversal of fortunes of Beria and Malenkov marked the resurrection of their enemy, Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s special friend, that hearty, pretentious intellectual who, after the stress of Leningrad, was a plump alcoholic with watery eyes and a livid complexion. Stalin openly talked about Zhdanov as his successor. Meanwhile, Beria could hardly conceal his loathing for Zhdanov’s pretensions: “He can just manage to play the piano with two fingers and to distinguish between a man and a bull in a picture, yet he holds forth on abstract painting!” 1

“The Pianist” had become a hero in Leningrad where he was apt to boast that the siege had been more important than the battle for Stalingrad. Sent as Stalin’s proconsul in Finland in 1945, he mastered Finnish history, displayed an encyclopaedic knowledge of Helsinki politics and even charmed the British representative there. When he pushed to annex Finland (a Russian duchy until 1917), Molotov reprimanded him: “You’ve gone too far… You’re too emotional!” But none of this harmed his standing with Stalin who recalled him from Leningrad and promoted him to Party Deputy in charge of both Agitprop and relations with foreign Parties, making him even more powerful than he had been before the war. His family, particularly his son Yury, became close to Stalin again. Indeed, they wrote to him en famille : “Dear Joseph Vissarionovich, we cordially congratulate you on… the anniversary of Bolshevism’s victory and ask you to accept our warmest greetings, Zinaida, Andrei, Anna and Yury Zhdanov.”

Zhdanov had played his cards cleverly since returning in January 1945. He consolidated his triumph over Malenkov and Beria by persuading Stalin to promote his own camarilla of Leningraders to power in Moscow: Alexei Kuznetsov, the haggard, long-faced and soft-spoken hero of the siege, received Malenkov’s Secretaryship. Zhdanov understood that Stalin did not wish Beria to control the MGB so he suggested Kuznetsov to replace him as curator of the Organs. It was “naïve” of Kuznetsov to accept this poisoned chalice; “he should have refused,” said Mikoyan, but he was “unworldly.” Kuznetsov’s promotions earned him the undying hatred of the two most vindictive predators in the Stalinist jungle: Beria and Malenkov.

By February 1946, with Stalin in semi-retirement, Zhdanov seemed to have control of the Party as well as cultural and foreign policy matters, and to have neutralized the Organs and the military. [257] Stalin himself soon retired as Armed Forces Minister, handing this to Bulganin, another ally of Zhdanov who hated Malenkov because he had removed him from the Western Front in 1943. The ruling inner circle of Five (Stalin, Molotov, Mikoyan, Malenkov and Beria) gradually expanded to embrace Zhdanov, Voznesensky, Bulganin and Kuznetsov, regardless of whether they were yet formally Politburo members. Zhdanov was hailed as the “second man in the Party,” its “greatest worker,” and his staff whispered about “our Crown Prince.” Stalin toyed with appointing him General Secretary. During 1946, Zhdanov signed decrees as “Secretary” alongside Stalin as Premier: “the Pianist” was so important that the Yugoslav Ambassador noticed how, when a bureaucrat entered his office, he bowed “to Zhdanov as he was approaching” and then retreated backwards, managing to cover “six or seven yards and in bowing himself out, he backed into the door, nervously trying to find the doorknob with his hand.” At the November parade, Zhdanov, in Stalin’s absence, took the salute with his Leningrad camarilla filling the Mausoleum.