Simon Montefiore - Stalin

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] Sergo and Alla were convinced this was “an intrigue by Malenkov and Beria who tricked Stalin. It’s amazing we believed this,” recalls Sergo. “But we never ONCE spoke about the case until after Stalin’s death.” His father allowed Sergo to see Kuznetsov’s son but not his wife because he knew she too would be arrested. As for the Kremlin children who lived in Granovsky Street, they noticed that suddenly their neighbours, the Voznesenskys and Kuznetsovs, had gone. “But no one mentioned it,” said Igor Malenkov, whose father was responsible. “I just concentrated on reading about sport.” Julia Khrushcheva “used to play with Natasha, Voznesensky’s daughter. Soon after her father’s arrest, I brought her home to our flat. But my mother said nothing.” The etiquette of unpersonage differed from family to family: while Natasha Poskrebysheva went on playing with Natasha Voznesenskaya, Nadya Vlasik “crossed the road whenever she saw her.” I am especially grateful to Sergo Mikoyan for sharing his account of this story. 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.”