Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Stalin helped bear Zhdanov’s open coffin at the funeral, showing kindness to the family. At dinner afterwards, Stalin became drunk. [281] Perhaps Stalin was affected by Zhdanov’s death. He re-named the dead man’s birthplace, Mariupol on the Black Sea, Zhdanov. According to the bodyguards, after Zhdanov’s funeral, Molotov was worried about Stalin’s health and asked them not to let him garden. When Stalin discovered this interference in his private life, he mistrusted Molotov all the more.

It was said that the Aragvi restaurant was full of Beria’s Georgians that night, toasting Zhdanov’s death. 5

On 8 September, Stalin, delayed in Moscow by the Berlin crisis and Zhdanov’s funeral, started a three-month holiday, moving restlessly from Sukhumi to the Livadia, where he entertained the Czech President Gottwald. At Museri, the old dacha built by Lakoba, he was visited by Molotov and Mikoyan. At dinner, Poskrebyshev rose and denounced Mikoyan: “Comrade Stalin, while you’re here resting in the south, Molotov and Mikoyan have prepared a plot against you in Moscow.”

Mikoyan leapt up, black eyes flashing: “You bastard!” he yelled, raising his fist to punch Poskrebyshev.

Stalin caught his hand: “Why do you shout like that?” he soothed Mikoyan. “You’re my guest!” Molotov sat “pale as paper like a statue.” Mikoyan protested his innocence. “If so, don’t pay any attention to him,” Stalin added, having inspired Poskrebyshev in the first place.

Stalin declared that these veterans were too old to succeed him. Mikoyan, just fifty-two, much younger than Stalin, thought this silly but said nothing. The successor, said Stalin, had to be a Russian, not a Caucasian. Molotov remained “the obvious person” but Stalin was disenchanted with him. Then, in a lethal blessing, Stalin pointed at the benign, long face of Zhdanov’s protégé, Kuznetsov: “here’s the man” he wanted to succeed him as General Secretary. Voznesensky would succeed as Premier. Mikoyan sensed “this was a very bad service to Kuznetsov, considering those who secretly dreamed of such a role.”

Stalin himself was bound to become suspicious of any anointed successor, especially given the failure of his Berlin Blockade, which had to be called off when the West energetically supplied their zones with a remarkable airlift. This only fuelled Stalin’s seething paranoia, already stimulated by his own illness, Tito’s defiance and Zionist stirrings among Russian Jews. Beria and Malenkov sharpened their knives. 6

While Stalin anointed successors in the south, the indomitable Envoy Extraordinary of the new State of Israel, Golda Myerson (known to history as Meir) arrived in Moscow on 3 September to tumultuous excitement among Soviet Jews. The Holocaust and the foundation of Israel had touched even the toughest Old Bolshevik internationalists like Polina Molotova. Voroshilov’s wife (née Golda Gorbman) amazed her family by saying, “Now we have our Motherland too.”

On Jewish New Year, Meir attended the Moscow Great Synagogue: jubilant Jews waited outside because the synagogue was full yet it was hardly a riot. Even Polina Molotova, now fifty-three, made an appearance. At Molotov’s 7 November diplomatic reception, Polina met Golda Meir, two formidable, intelligent women from almost identical backgrounds.

Polina spoke Yiddish, the language of her childhood, which she always used when she met Mitteleuropeans, though she tactfully called it “the Austrian language.” Meir asked how she knew Yiddish. “ Ikh bin a yidishe tokhter ,” replied Polina. “I’m a daughter of the Jewish people.” As they parted, Polina said, “If things go well for you, then things will be good for Jews all over the world.” Perhaps she did not know how Stalin resented her pushy intelligence, snobbish elegance, Jewish background, American businessman brother and, as he told Svetlana, “bad influence on Nadya.” Her sacking in May was a warning but she did not know that Stalin had considered murdering her in 1939. [282] Some Jews were sacked. Kaganovich continued as Deputy Premier and Politburo member but his elder brother Yuli lost his job. Like Polina, Kaganovich’s grandson recalls that Lazar too remembered the Yiddish of his childhood: when he met the German Communist Ernest Thalman he tried to use it. The “second lady of the state,” Andreyev’s wife Dora Khazan, was sacked as Deputy Minister of Textiles and General Khrulev’s Jewish wife was arrested. Mekhlis, like Kaganovich, continued as Minister of State Control and only retired in 1950 after a stroke. The Jewish Boris Vannikov continued to run the First Directorate of Sovmin in charge of the nuclear project.

The synagogue “demonstration” and Polina’s Yiddish schtick outraged the old man on holiday, confirming that Soviet Jews were becoming an American Fifth Column. No wonder Molotov had supported a Jewish Crimea. On 20 November, the Politburo dismantled the Jewish Committee and unleashed an anti-Semitic terror, managed by Malenkov and Abakumov. Mikhoels’s colleagues were now arrested, together with some brilliant Jewish writers and scientists, from the Yiddish poet Perets Markish to the biochemist Lina Shtern. They also arrested the father of Svetlana’s newly divorced husband: “The entire older generation’s contaminated with Zionism,” Stalin lectured her, “and now they’re teaching the young people too.”

Stalin ordered the prisoners to be tortured to implicate Polina Molotova while spending the steamy evenings over dinner at Coldstream, telling Charkviani folksy tales of his childhood. He suddenly missed his old friends, particularly a priest named Peter Kapanadze with whom he had studied at the seminary. After the Revolution, the priest had become a teacher but Stalin sometimes sent him money. Now he invited Kapanadze and MGB Lieut.-Gen. Sasha Egnatashvili, the Gori family friend whom Stalin called “the innkeeper’s son,” to a dinner party. Charkviani hurried back to Tiflis to gather the guests. The seven old friends were soon singing Georgian songs led by the “host with the sweet voice.” Stalin insisted that some of them stay for a week by which time, like all his guests, they were desperate to escape. Finally one of them displayed considerable ingenuity by singing a folk song at dinner with the refrain: “Better go than stay!”

“Oh I see,” said Stalin, “you’re bored. You must be missing your grandchildren.”

“No, Soso,” replied the guest. “It’s impossible to be bored here but we’ve been here almost a week, wasting your time…” Stalin let them go, returning on 2 December to Moscow, brooding about the dangerous duplicity of Molotov. He had discovered (probably from Vyshinsky) that Molotov had travelled alone in a special railway carriage from New York to Washington when he had perhaps received instructions to undermine the USSR with a Jewish homeland. It was Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s alter ego, who “started to hint” to Molotov: “Why did they assign you a special car?” Molotov put “two and two together” but there was nothing he could do.

Amazingly, it was an opera that finally convinced Stalin to move against the Molotovs. Soon after his return, Stalin saw an Armenian opera, Almast , that told the story of a prince whose wife betrays him. “He saw treason could be anywhere with anyone” but especially among the wives of the great. Stalin, fortified operatically and armed with Abakumov’s testimonies, confronted Molotov with Polina’s guilt. “He and I quarrelled about it,” said Molotov.

“It’s time for you to divorce your wife,” said Stalin. Molotov agreed, partly because he was a Bolshevik but partly because obedience might save the woman he loved.