Simon Montefiore - Stalin

“Ivan the Terrible seems a hysteric in the Eisenstein version!”

“Historical figures,” added Stalin, “must be shown correctly… Ivan the Terrible kissed his wife too long.” Kisses, again. “It wasn’t permitted at that time.” Then came the crux: “Ivan the Terrible was very cruel,” said Stalin. “You can show he was cruel. But you must show why he needed to be cruel .” Then Zhdanov raised the crucial question of Ivan’s beard. Eisenstein promised to shorten it. Eisenstein asked if he could smoke.

“It seems to me there’s no ban on smoking. Maybe we’ll vote on it.” Stalin smiled at Eisenstein. “I don’t give you instructions, I merely give you the comments of a viewer.” [261] Eisenstein died before he could shorten the beard, cut the kiss and show why The Terrible “needed to be cruel.” This was a mercy since it seems unlikely he would have survived the anti-Semitic purge of 1951–53.

Zhdanov’s campaign to promote Russian patriotism was soon so absurd that Sakharov remembered how people would joke about “Russia, homeland of the elephant.” More ominously, the unleashing of Russian nationalism and the attacks on “cosmopolitans” turned against the Jews.

Early in the war, Stalin realized the usefulness of Soviet Jewry in appealing for American help but even then the project was stained with blood. [262] The first two candidates to lead this wartime PR campaign, Polish leaders of the Bund ( Jewish Socialist Party), V. Alter and G. Ehlich, demanded too much and were arrested, respectively being shot and committing suicide in prison. Stalin then ordered Beria to set up the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, controlled by the NKVD but officially led by the famous Yiddish actor, Solomon Mikhoels, “short, with the face of a puckish intellectual, with a prominent forehead and a pouting lower lip,” whom Kaganovich had perform King Lear for Stalin. When Mikhoels toured America to raise support for Russia in April 1943, Molotov briefed him and Stalin emerged from his office to wave goodbye. The JAFC was supervised by Solomon Lozovsky, a grizzled Old Bolshevik with a biblical beard who was the token Jew in the highest echelons of Molotov’s Foreign Commissariat.

The ghastly revelations of the Nazi Holocaust, the Mikhoels tour and the attractions of Zionism to give the Jewish people a safe haven, softened the stern internationalism of even the highest Bolsheviks. Stalin tolerated this but encouraged a traditional anti-Semitic reaction. When casting Ivan the Terrible, Part Two , Bolshakov openly rejected one actress because “her Semitic features are clearly visible.” Anyone too Jewish-looking was sacked.

When the advancing Soviet Army exposed Hitler’s unique Jewish genocide, Khrushchev, the Ukrainian boss, resisted any special treatment for Jews staggering home from the death camps. He even refused to return their homes, which had meanwhile been occupied by Ukrainians. This habitual anti-Semite grumbled that “Abramoviches” were preying on his fiefdom “like crows.”

This sparked a genuine debate around Stalin. Mikhoels complained to Molotov that “after the Jewish catastrophe, the local authorities pay no attention.” Molotov forwarded this to Beria who, to his credit, was sympathetic. Beria demanded that Khrushchev help the Jews who “were more repressed than any others by the Germans.” In this he was taking a risk since Stalin had decreed that all Soviet citizens suffered equally . Stalin later suspected Beria of being too close to the Jews, perhaps the origin of the rumour that Beria himself was a “secret” Jew. Molotov forwarded Beria’s order. Khrushchev agreed to help his “Abramoviches.”

Encouraged by this growing sympathy, Mikhoels and his colleague Fefer, a poet [263] Fefer was the author of an absurd poem during WWII called “I a Jew” in which he praised the great Jewish Bolsheviks from King Solomon to Marx, Sverdlov and “Stalin’s friend Kaganovich” which no doubt enormously embarrassed the latter. and MGB plant, suggested a Jewish republic in the Crimea (now empty of Tartars), or in Saratov (now empty of the Volga Germans) to Molotov and his deputy in charge of the JAFC, Lozovsky. Molotov thought the Volga German idea ridiculous, “it’s impossible to see a Jew on a tractor,” but preferred the Crimea: “Why don’t you write a memorandum to me and Comrade Stalin, and we’ll see.”

“Everyone,” recalls Vladimir Redens, “believed Jewish Crimea would happen.” Molotov, showing more independence than before, may have discussed this with Beria but his judgement almost cost him his life. Most of those involved were dead within five years.

On 2 February 1944 Mikhoels delivered his letter to Molotov, copied to Stalin who now decided that the actor had moved from Soviet to Jewish propaganda. Stalin, with his acute awareness of anti-Semitism, sent Kaganovich to pour cold water on the idea of this “Jewish California”: “Only actors and poets could come up with such a scheme,” he said, that was “worth nothing in practice!” Zhdanov supervised the making of lists of Jews in different departments and recommended closing down the JAFC. [264] Zhdanov’s chief ideological anti-Semite was the tall, thin and ascetic CC Secretary Mikhail Suslov, who had played a key role in the Caucasian deportations and then served as Stalin’s proconsul in the Baltics which he brutally purged after the war. Working alternately under both Zhdanov and Malenkov, he became one of Stalin’s youngish protégés. Like Molotov in 1939, Zhdanov loosed his hounds against Jews in the apparat which, he said, had become “some kind of synagogue.”

Stalin’s anti-Semitism remained a mixture of old-fashioned prejudice, suspicion of a people without a land, and distrust, since his enemies were often Jewish. He was so unabashed that he openly told Roosevelt at Yalta that the Jews were “middlemen, profiteers and parasites.” But after 1945, there was a change: Stalin emerged as a vicious and obsessional anti-Semite.

Always supremely political, this was partly a pragmatic judgement: it matched his new Russian nationalism. The supremacy of America with its powerful Jewish community made his own Jews, with their U.S. connections restored during the war, appear a disloyal Fifth Column. His suspicion of the Jews was another facet of his inferiority complex towards America as well as a symptom of his fear of the new self-assertive confidence of his own victorious people. It was also a way to control his old comrades whose Jewish connections symbolized their new cosmopolitan confidence after victory. Equally, he loathed any people with mixed loyalties: he noticed the Holocaust had touched and awakened Soviet Jewry even among the magnates. His new anti-Semitism flowed from his own seething paranoia, exacerbated when Fate entangled the Jews in his family.

Yet he still played the internationalist, often attacking people for antiSemitism and rewarding Jews in public, from Mekhlis to the novelist Ehrenburg. Soon this malevolent whirlpool threatened to consume Molotov, Beria and his own clan. 1

“As soon as hostilities end,” Stalin said at Yalta, “the soldiers are forgotten and lapse into oblivion.” He wished this was so but the prestige of Marshal Zhukov had never been higher. The Western press even acclaimed him as Stalin’s successor. Stalin liked Zhukov but “didn’t recognize personal ties” and he probed to see if this idea had any support.

“I’m getting old,” he casually told Budyonny, his old pal and Zhukov’s friend. “What do you think of Zhukov succeeding me?”