Simon Montefiore - Stalin

As the Americans advanced into North Korea towards the Chinese border, Mao desperately looked towards Stalin, fearing that if they intervened and fought the Americans, their Sino-Soviet Treaty would embroil Russia too. Stalin replied, with Nero-like nonchalance, that he was “far from Moscow and somewhat cut off from events in Korea.” But on 5 October, Stalin fired off a telegram of blunt realpolitik and shameless bluff: America was “not prepared… for a big war” but if it came to it, “let it happen now and not in a few years when Japanese militarism will be restored.” Thus Stalin pulled the sting out of Mao’s reservations and pushed his ally one step closer to war.

Mao deployed nine divisions but despatched Chou to Stalin’s holiday house, probably New Athos, to discuss the promised Soviet air cover for the Chinese troops. On 9 October, a tense Chou, accompanied by Mao’s trusted protégé, the fragile but talented Lin Piao, later his doomed heir apparent, faced Stalin, Malenkov, Beria, Kaganovich, Bulganin, Mikoyan and Molotov.

“Today we want to listen to the opinions and thinking of our Chinese comrades,” Stalin opened the meeting. When Chou stated the situation, Stalin replied that Russia could not enter the war—but China should. Nonetheless, if Kim lost, he offered the North Koreans sanctuary. He could only help with military equipment. Chou, who had been counting on Soviet air cover, gasped. Afterwards, Stalin invited the Chinese to a Bacchanal from which only Lin Piao emerged sober.

This was one of the occasions when Beria disagreed with Stalin and, as ever, he was the most daring in expressing himself. When he came out of the meeting on sending Chinese forces into Korea, he found the Georgian boss, Charkviani, waiting outside: “What’s he doing?” Beria, who understood the nuclear threat, exclaimed nervously. “The Americans will be furious. He’ll make them our enemy.” Charkviani was amazed to hear such heresy.

“It’s hard for me to trust a man 100% but I think I can rely on him,” Stalin reflected to Mgeladze over dinner, having manoeuvred Mao into fighting the Americans without Soviet air cover.

On 19 October, Mao deployed his waves of Chinese cannon fodder to throw back the surprised Americans. Henceforth, even when the front finally stabilized along the 38th Parallel and the North Koreans begged for peace, Stalin refused to agree: attrition suited him. As he told Chou at a later meeting, in a phrase that illustrates Stalin’s entire monstrous career, the North Koreans could keep on fighting indefinitely because they “lose nothing, except for their men.” 4

While the old Generalissimo basked in the sun pulling the strings in Korea, he was also killing his own men. On 29 September, Kuznetsov and Voznesensky were tried at the Officers’ Club in Leningrad before an MGB audience. Before the trial finally started, the accused were ordered to leave Zhdanov out of their testimony. The main accused were sentenced to death by shooting next day and the Politburo endorsed the sentences. “He’d sign first,” admitted Khrushchev, “and then pass it around for the rest of us to sign. We’d sign without even looking…” Did they sign the death list over dinner on the veranda?

Kuznetsov defiantly refused to confess, which outraged Stalin and embarrassed Abakumov:

“I’m a Bolshevik and remain one in spite of the sentence I have received. History will justify us.” The accused were said to have been bundled into white sacks by the Chekists and dragged out to be shot. They were killed fifty-nine minutes after midnight on 1 October, their families exiled to the camps.

There is some evidence that Stalin marked the lists with symbols specifying how they were to die. Voznesensky may have been kept alive for a while because Stalin later asked Malenkov: “Is he in the Urals? Give him some work to do!” Malenkov informed Stalin that Voznesensky had frozen to death in the back of a prison truck in sub-zero temperatures.

After Stalin’s death, Rada Khrushcheva asked what had happened to Kuznetsov: “He died terribly,” replied her father, “with a hook through his neck.” 5

This little massacre consolidated the power of Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev and Bulganin—the last men standing as Stalin entered his final years—but it was the swan song of Abakumov. That sensuous, flashy sadist would soon roll up his bloody carpet for good. Perhaps it was over-confidence that led him to close the Jewish Case in March 1950: no one was released. The tortures were so grievous that one victim counted two thousand separate blows on his buttocks and heels.

Yet as that main case temporarily subsided, Stalin was orchestrating another anti-Semitic spasm from his holiday. Anti-Semitism now “grew like a tumour in Stalin’s mind,” said Khrushchev, yet he himself praised it in Pravda . Stalin called in the Ukrainian bosses for a dinner at which he briefed them on orchestrating a similar anti-Semitic campaign in Kiev. The hunt for “Zionist danger” was pursued through the government with thousands of Jews being sacked. [293] Even Svetlana’s husband was now involved. In the Central Committee machine, Yury Zhdanov, Stalin’s son-in-law, that highly qualified paragon of Soviet education, reported to the orchestrator of the anti-Semitic hunt, Malenkov, that some scientists “had flooded theoretical departments of… Institutes with its supporters, Jews by origin.”

Stalin was particularly fascinated by a case against Jewish managers in the prestigious Stalin Automobile Plant that made his limousines: they had sent Mikhoels a telegram celebrating the foundation of Israel.

“The good workers at the factory should be given clubs so they can beat the hell out of those Jews at the end of the working day,” Stalin told Khrushchev in February.

“Well, have you received your orders?” Beria asked sardonically. Khrushchev, Malenkov and Beria, that inseparable threesome, summoned the Jewish ZiS managers to the Kremlin and accused them of “loss of vigilance” and complicity in an “anti-Soviet Jewish nationalistic sabotage group.” The terrified manager fainted. The three magnates had to resuscitate him with cold water. Stalin released the manager but two Jewish journalists, one a woman, who had written about the factory, were executed. His personal intervention made the difference between life and death. Another Jewish manager, Zaltsman, was saved because, during the war, he had sent Stalin a desk set shaped like a tank with the pens forming the guns.

The Jews were not Stalin’s only target: his suspicions of Beria were constantly fanned by the ambitious Mgeladze, his boss in Abkhazia, who shrewdly revealed Beria’s crimes and vendettas of the late thirties. Stalin encouraged him and denounced Beria during their chats over dinner. Mgeladze’s was only one voice that informed Stalin of how corruptly the Mingrelians ran Georgia. Beria was a Mingrelian, so was Charkviani who had run it since 1938. Stalin ordered Abakumov to check the notoriously venal Georgia, and build a case against the Mingrelians, not forgetting Beria himself: “Go after the Big Mingrelian.” 6

On 18 November, towards the end of his holiday, Stalin agreed to arrest the first Jewish doctor. Professor Yakov Etinger, who had treated the leaders, was bugged talking too frankly about Stalin. Etinger was tortured about his “nationalistic” tendencies by one of Abakumov’s officers, Lieut.-Col. Mikhail Riumin, who forced him to implicate all the most distinguished Jewish doctors in Moscow but he somehow failed to please his boss. Abakumov ordered Riumin to desist but the officer tortured Etinger so enthusiastically that he died of “heart paralysis”—a euphemism for dying under torture. Riumin was in trouble—unless he could destroy Abakumov first.