Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Stalin was “afraid of Beria,” thought Khrushchev, “and would have been glad to get rid of him but didn’t know how to do it.” Stalin himself confirmed this, sensing that Beria was winning support: “Beria’s so wily and tricksy. He’s become so trusted by the Politburo that they defend him. They don’t realize he’s pulled the wool over their eyes. For example—Vyacheslav [Molotov] and Lazar [Kaganovich]. I think Beria has his eye on a future goal. But he’s limited. In his time, he did great work but as for now… I’m not sure he wouldn’t misuse his power.” Then Stalin remembered his closest allies: “Zhdanov and Kirov thought poorly of him but… we liked Beria for his modesty and efficiency. Later he lost these qualities. He’s just a policeman.”

Ignatiev sent sixty MGB interrogators and a torture specialist carrying a special medical case filled with his instruments, down to Tiflis. Stalin phoned Charkviani, with whom he had spent hours discussing literature and family, and without saying hello, threatened:

“You’ve closed your eyes to corruption in Georgia… Things’ll go badly for you, Comrade Charkviani.” He hung up. Charkviani was terrified.

The Beria family, Nina and Sergo, sensed this tightening garrote. Stalin appointed Beria to give the prestigious 6 November address but three days afterwards, he dictated an order about a Mingrelian conspiracy that directly threatened Beria, using his wife Nina’s links to the Menshevik émigrés in Paris.

Vasily Stalin naïvely confided to Sergo Beria that relations between their fathers were “tense,” which he blamed on anti-Georgian Russians in the Politburo. Svetlana, who was so close to Nina, warned her that something was afoot. Beria’s marriage to Nina was under strain because Lilya Drozhdova had given birth to a daughter by Beria whom they named Martha after his mother. Lilya was now about seventeen and she had lasted as Beria’s mistress for a couple of years. The bodyguards told Martha Peshkova that when Lilya was at the dacha, the baby was placed in the same cradles as Sergo’s children. Not surprisingly, the arrival of the baby upset Nina. She unhappily decided she needed a separate life and built herself a cottage in Sukhumi.

On 22 December 1951, Stalin, like a lame, restless and hungry tiger, returned to Moscow, clearly intent on enforcing a new Terror, with specific anti-Semitic features. The torture chambers of Ignatiev and Riumin groaned with new Jewish and Mingrelian victims to destroy Molotov and Beria. Stalin did know how to “get rid” of Beria, but the “master of dosage” had always worked with agonizing patience. But now he was old. Stalin loathed Beria yet “when in a morose mood, he came to see us seeking human warmth.” Stalin admitted to Nina he could barely sleep anymore: “You can’t know how tired I am. I have to sleep like a gun dog.”

Beria played Stalin well: he shrewdly offered to purge Georgia himself. In March 1952, Beria sacked Charkviani, [297] Stalin protected Charkviani because the leader had been taught the alphabet as a boy by a Father Charkviani. Stalin moved him to work as a CC Inspector in Moscow. But Beria was powerless to defend himself or his protégés. When the Mingrelian secret policeman Rapava, who was a family friend of the Berias, was arrested, his wife bravely set off secretly to Moscow to ask Nina Beria’s help. But when the desperate woman called Beria’s house, Nina was too scared to come to the phone. The German housekeeper Ella said, “Nina cannot come to the phone.” This was how the Mingrelians realized that Beria himself was in trouble. replaced him with Mgeladze and publically admitted: “I too am guilty.”

Stalin and Beria despised each other but were linked by invisible threads of past crimes, mutual envy and complementary cunning. Stalin still discussed foreign policy with Beria, even letting him write a paper proposing a neutral, reunified Germany. Beria could still manipulate the Generalissimo with what Khrushchev called “Jesuitical shrewdness” but he was too clever by half, riling Stalin. “You’re playing with a tiger,” Nina warned him.

“I couldn’t resist it,” replied Beria.

The gap between Beria’s dreams and his reality had made him “a deeply unhappy man,” wrote his son. Without the ideological fanaticism that bound the others to Stalin, Beria now questioned the entire Soviet system: “The USSR can never succeed until we have private property,” he told Charkviani. He despised Stalin, whom he considered “no longer human. I think there is only one word that describes what my father felt in those days,” wrote Sergo Beria. “Hatred.” Beria became ever more daring in his denunciations of Stalin: “For a long time,” he sneered sarcastically, “the Soviet State had been too small for Joseph Vissarionovich!” Always the most craven and most irreverent, he denounced Stalin but the other leaders were afraid to join in: “I considered it an attempt to provoke us,” said Mikoyan.

Yet, gradually, their shared fears and Stalin’s unpredictability created a “sense of solidarity,” a support system among ambitious killers who wanted to survive and protect their families. Even Beria became the unlikely avuncular comforter for bruisers like Khrushchev and Mikoyan in these uneasy times. The others revelled in Beria’s eclipse—and shared his fears. Malenkov warned him, Khrushchev teased him. Molotov and Kaganovich were so impressed with Beria that even when Stalin criticized him, they defended him. Yet any and all were ready to destroy the others. It was not long before Ignatiev and his MGB torturers were even trying to link Stalin’s two obsessions: Beria, they whispered, was secretly Jewish. 3

That spring, Stalin was examined by his veteran doctor, Vinogradov, who was shocked by his deterioration. He suffered from hypertension and arteriosclerosis with occasional disturbances in cerebral circulation, which caused minor strokes and little cysts in the brain tissue of the frontal lobe. This exacerbated Stalin’s anger, amnesia and paranoia. “Complete rest, freedom from all work,” wrote Vinogradov on the file but the mention of retirement infuriated Stalin who ordered his medical records destroyed and resolved to see no more doctors. Vinogradov was an Enemy.

On 15 February, Stalin ordered the arrests of more doctors who admitted helping to kill Shcherbakov, which in turn led to Dr. Lydia Timashuk, the cardiologist who had written to Stalin about the mistreatment of Zhdanov. Stalin called in Ignatiev and told him that, if he did not accelerate the interrogations of the Jewish doctors already under arrest, he would join Abakumov in prison. The MGB were “nincompoops!”

“I’m not a supplicant of the MGB!” barked Stalin at Ignatiev. “I can knock you out if you don’t follow my orders… We’ll scatter your group!” He now talked more to his bodyguards and Valechka than to his comrades. The death of the Mongolian dictator Marshal Choibalsang in Moscow that spring worried him enough to confide in his chauffeur: “They die one after another. Shcherbakov, Zhdanov, Dmitrov, Choibalsang… die so quickly! [298] Georgi Dmitrov, the Bulgarian leader, died in 1949. We must change the old doctors for new ones.” The bodyguards could talk quite intimately to Stalin and Colonel Tukov replied that those doctors were very experienced. “No, we must change them for new ones… The MVD insists on arresting them as saboteurs.” Valechka heard him say he was not sure about the case. But Stalin was not for turning: he wanted the Jewish Crimea case to be tried imminently. Lozovsky and a distinguished cast of Jewish intellectuals again became the playthings of Riumin and Komarov.

Meanwhile, Vasily Stalin’s treatment for alcoholism had failed completely. At the May Day parade, the weather was bad and the planes should not have been allowed to fly but a drunken Vasily ordered the flypast to proceed. Two Tupolev-4 bombers crashed. Stalin watched darkly from the Mausoleum and afterwards sacked Vasily as Moscow air-force commander, sending him back to the Air Force Academy. 4