Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Abakumov was not guilty of idleness: Stalin was now redoubling the repression. Arrests intensified. In 1950 there were more slaves in the Gulags—2.6 million—than ever before. But Abakumov knew too much about the Leningrad and Jewish cases. Worse, Stalin sensed the foot-dragging of the MGB—and Abakumov himself. It was Yagoda all over again—and he needed a Yezhov.

The brakes on the Jewish Case, the rumours of corruption, the whispers of Beria and Malenkov, possibly the strutting bumptiousness of the man himself, turned Stalin against Abakumov. There was no sudden break but when Stalin returned from holiday, [294] “I want to delay my return because of bad weather in Moscow and the danger of flu. I’ll be in Moscow after the coming of frost,” Stalin wrote to Malenkov on December 1950. just after his seventy-first birthday, on 22 December, he did not summon Abakumov. The weekly meetings ceased, as they had for Yagoda and Yezhov. Within the MGB snakepit, the ebbing of Stalin’s favour and the death of Etinger presented Riumin with an opportunity. “Little Mishka” or, as Stalin nicknamed him, “the Midget” or “Pygmy”—the “Shibsdik,” was the Vozhd’s second murderous dwarf.

Riumin, thirty-eight, plump and balding, stupid and vicious, was the latest in the succession of ambitious torturers who were only too willing to please and encourage Stalin by finding new Enemies and killing them for him. Unlike Yezhov, who had been so popular until he became an inquisitor, Riumin was already an enthusiastic killer even though he had passed eight school grades, qualifying as an accountant. As Malenkov showed, education was no bar to mass murder. He had his own problems. Dismissed for misappropriating money in 1937—and now in danger for killing the elderly Jewish doctor, the Midget decided to act. Perhaps to his own surprise, he lit the fuse of the Doctors’ Plot.

On 2 July 1951, Riumin wrote to Stalin and accused Abakumov of deliberately killing Etinger to conceal a Jewish medical conspiracy to murder leaders such as the late Shcherbakov. This brought together Stalin’s fears of ageing, doctors and Jews. It was not Beria but Malenkov who sent Riumin’s letter to Stalin. This is confirmed by Malenkov’s assistant though he claimed that Riumin wrote the letter “for his own reasons.” The Doctors’ Plot worked against Beria and the old guard like Molotov but this swelling case could threaten Malenkov and Khrushchev too. So often at Stalin’s court, a case would start coincidentally, be encouraged by some magnate and then be spun back at them by Stalin like a bloody boomerang. Malenkov sometimes allied himself with Khrushchev, sometimes with Beria, but it was always Stalin making the big decisions. Riumin’s allegation of medical murder may have been prompted by Stalin himself—or it may have been the spark that inspired him to reach back to Zhdanov’s death and create a maze of conspiracies to provoke a Terror that would unite the country against America outside and its Jewish allies within.

He now ordered Beria and Malenkov to examine the “Bad Situation at the MGB,” accusing Abakumov of corruption, ineptitude and debauchery. Around midnight on 5 July in the Little Corner, Stalin agreed to Malenkov’s suggestion to appoint Semyon Ignatiev, forty-seven, as the new boss. At 1 a.m., Abakumov was called in to hear of his downfall. At 1:40 a.m., Riumin arrived to receive his prizes: promotion to general and, later, Deputy Minister. Serving a short spell as a Chekist in 1920, Ignatiev was an eager, bespectacled CC bureaucrat who was a friend of Khrushchev and Malenkov. Indeed Khrushchev described Ignatiev as “mild and considerate” though the Jewish doctors would hardly have agreed with him. Beria again failed to regain control over the secret police. Henceforth Stalin himself ran the Doctors’ Plot through Ignatiev. Stalin sent Malenkov to tell the MGB that he wanted to find a “grand intelligence network of the U.S.A.” linked to “Zionists.”

The next day, 12 July, Abakumov was arrested. In the tradition of fallen secret policemen, his corruption was lovingly recorded: 3,000 metres of expensive cloth, clothes, sets of china, crystal vases—“enough for a shop”—were found in his homes. In order to build his flats Abakumov removed sixteen families and spent a million roubles to make a “palace” using two hundred workers, six engineers and the entire MGB Construction Department. Yet the downfall of monsters also destroyed the innocent: Abakumov’s young wife, Antonina Smirnova, with whom he had a two-month-old son, had received 70,000 roubles’ worth of presents, including an antique Viennese pram. So she was arrested: the destiny of the girl and the baby are unknown. [295] As in 1937, the Terror first destroyed the leadership of the MGB itself which was now arrested. Colonel Naum Shvartsman, one of the cruellest torturers since the late thirties and a journalist expert at editing confessions, testified that he had had sex not only with his own son and daughter but also with Abakumov himself, and, at night when he broke into the British Embassy, with Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, a momentous diplomatic development in Anglo-Soviet relations that had mysteriously passed unnoticed at the Court of St. James. Shvartsman claimed to have been poisoned with “Zionist soup”—an idea that harks back to the infamous plot by Enemies in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast during the thirties to poison Kaganovich’s gefilte. But he also delivered what Stalin wanted, implicating Abakumov, that unlikely Zionist sympathiser.

Abakumov, no longer a Minister but just a number, Object 15, spent three months shackled in the refrigerator cell, being viciously interrogated by his nemesis, the Midget: “Dear LP,” he wrote pitifully to Beria, “I feel so terrible… You’re the closest man to me, and I wait for you to ask me back… You will need me in the future.”

Abakumov had been destroyed for failing to push the Jewish Case. Ignatiev and the egregious “Midget” Riumin set about torturing the Jewish officials of the JAFC and the doctors to “substantiate the evidence of espionage and nationalistic activity.” 1

The impresario of this theatre of plots and pain was now ageing fast. He sometimes became so giddy that he fell over in his Kremlin apartment. The bodyguards had to keep a close eye on him because “he didn’t look after himself.” He hardly bothered to read all his papers. Kuntsevo was strewn with unopened boxes. He still corrected Bulganin’s speeches like a schoolmaster but then forgot Bulganin’s name in front of the rest of the Politburo: “Look, what’s your name?”

“Bulganin.”

“Right yes… that’s what I meant to say.”

Riven by arthritis, diminished by raging arteriosclerosis, dazed by fainting spells, embarrassed by failing memory, tormented by sore gums and false teeth, unpredictable, paranoid and angry, Stalin left on 10 August for his last and longest holiday. “Cursed old age has caught up with me,” he muttered. He was even more restless than usual, travelling from Gagra to New Athos, Tsaltubo to Borzhomi and back. At Lake Ritsa, the woods, lakeside and paths were peppered with strange green metal boxes, containing special telephones so Stalin could call for help if taken ill on a stroll.

But dizzy spells were not going to stop him cleansing his entourage: “I, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov—we’re all old… we must fill… the Politburo with younger… cadres,” he ominously told Mgeladze. Yet his paranoia gave him no rest: “I’m finished,” he told Mikoyan and Khrushchev who, like all the magnates, were on holiday nearby so they could visit Stalin twice a week. “I don’t even trust myself.”