Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Eight days later, at midday on 8 May, the “trial of the Jewish poets” starring Solomon Lozovsky, former Deputy Foreign Minister, and the Yiddish poet Perets Markish opened in the Dzerzhinsky Officers’ Club at the Lubianka. Stalin had already specified that virtually all the defendants were to be shot.

Lozovsky had been tortured but his pride in his Bolshevik and, more surprisingly, Jewish pedigrees was unbroken. His speech shines out of this primordial darkness as the most remarkable and moving oration of dignity and courage in all of Stalin’s trials. He also shredded Riumin’s imbecilic Jewish-Crimean conspiracy.

“Even if I had wanted to engage in such activity… would I have gotten in touch with a poet and an actor?… After all, there is an American Embassy… swarming with intelligence officers. The doorman at the Commissariat of Finance would not do such a thing, let alone the Deputy Foreign Minister!”

Lozovsky was so convincing that the judge, Lieut.-Gen. Alexander Cheptsov, stopped the trial, a unique happening which suggests that Stalin was forcing a new Terror onto an unwilling and no longer blindly obedient bureaucracy. Cheptsov complained of its flimsiness to Malenkov in the presence of a rattled Ignatiev—and humiliated Riumin. Malenkov ordered the trial to proceed. On 18 July, Cheptsov sentenced thirteen defendants to death (including two women), sparing only the scientist Lina Shtern, perhaps because of her research into longevity. But Cheptsov did not carry out the executions, ignoring Riumin’s shrill orders to do so, and appealed to Malenkov.

“Do you want to bring us to kneel before these criminals?” Malenkov retorted. “The Politburo has investigated this case three times. Carry out the Politburo’s resolution.” Malenkov admitted later that he had not told Stalin everything: “I did not dare!”

Stalin rejected official appeals. Lozovsky [299] One of the survivors of Stalin’s time, Maxim Litvinov, the Jewish ex–Foreign Commissar, managed to die in his bed on 31 December 1951. He was a perennial target of the MGB’s anti-Semitic cases. Molotov admitted that Litvinov should have been shot for his rambunctious indiscretions in the late war years: “It was only by chance that he remained among the living,” said Molotov chillingly. There was a plan to arrange a road accident à la Mikhoels but finally Litvinov died with his errant English wife by his bedside: “Englishwoman go home!” were his last words. “They did not get him,” said Ivy Litvinov who returned to London. Their daughter now lives in Brighton. and the Jewish poets were shot on 12 August 1952. 5

Stalin refused to take a holiday that August: instead, unhappy at the dominance of Malenkov and Khrushchev, he decided to call a Congress in October, the first one since 1939, to anoint new, younger leaders and destroy his old comrades.

By September, Ignatiev, assisted by “Midget” Riumin, had tortured the evidence out of his prisoners to “prove” that the Kremlin doctors, led by Stalin’s own physician, had indeed murdered Zhdanov, Shcherbakov, Dmitrov and Choibalsang. A new crop were arrested but not yet Vinogradov. On the 18th, Stalin told Riumin to torture the doctors. Riumin, who possessed a macabre gift for primitive theatre, designed a special torture chamber at Lefortovo, furnished like a dissection room and operating theatre, to intimidate the doctors. Long before Laurence Olivier played the Nazi dentist in Marathon Man , Stalin was torturing his own doctors in a ghastly surgical parody.

“You’re acting like a whore! You’re an ignoble spy, a terrorist!” Riumin shouted at one of the doctors. “We’ll torture you with a red-hot iron. We have all the necessary equipment for that…” Stalin’s family was included in a bizarre medical melodrama, spawned by Stalin’s furious imagination and Riumin’s diabolical obedience: the doctors had deliberately subverted Vasily Stalin’s treatment for “nervous disorders” and had failed to prevent toxicosis in Svetlana Stalin after the birth of her child Katya Zhdanov in the spring of 1950. A surreal touch, if any was needed, was added by the case of Andreyev who had been ill since 1947: the doctors prescribed cocaine for his insomnia so it was hardly surprising he was unable to sleep. Andreyev [300] Andreyev had appealed to Malenkov in January 1949 to “check the treatment… I don’t feel good despite following doctors’ orders. My head’s dizzy… I almost fall over. I’m disastrous. I feel the treatment and diagnosis is wrong…” He was probably right since the cocaine was clearly the wrong medicine. He signed off: “I’m devilishly unhappy to be out of work.” had become dependent on the drug, one of history’s more unlikely coke addicts. 6

Absurd as the details may sound, the Doctors’ Plot had the beautiful enveloping symmetry of a panacea, one of Stalin’s fantastical masterpieces: working alone, only informing his grandees when he had results, and keeping complete control over all the parallel threads through the “Midget,” he weaved a tapestry that sewed together every intrigue and leading victim since the war, in order to mobilize the Soviet people against the external enemy, America, and its internal agents, the Jews, and therefore justify a new Terror. New research shows Stalin would toss into this cauldron various “murderous” Jews and doctors, Abakumov and his “unvigilant” Chekist “nincompoops,” and the executed Leningrader, Kuznetsov, who would be the link between the Jews, Zhdanov’s death, and the magnates—especially Mikoyan, via their children’s marriage. Just as in 1937 a man did not have to be a Trotskyite to be shot as one, so now the victims did not have to be Jewish to be accused of “Zionism”: Abakumov, no philo-Semite, was now smeared with Zionism. As for the sturdily Russian Molotov, Stalin had not nicknamed him “Molotstein,” in the twenties, for nothing.

Did Stalin really believe it all? Yes, passionately, because it was politically necessary, which was better than mere truth. “We ourselves will be able to determine,” Stalin told Ignatiev, “what is true and what is not.”

Stimulated by his labyrinth of secret investigations, Stalin did not give up his literary and scientific interests. As his brain atrophied, Stalin still “swotted like a good pupil,” as Beria put it, studying to dominate new fields and solve ideological problems. “I am seventy yet I go on learning just the same,” Stalin boasted to Svetlana. He read all the entries for the Stalin Prize and chaired the Committee to choose the winners in his office. That year, pacing as usual, he decreed that a novelist named Stepan Zlobin should win. Malenkov however pulled out a file and said, “Comrade Stalin, Zlobin conducted himself very badly when he was in a German concentration camp…”

Stalin walked round the table three times in dead silence then asked: “To forgive?” He continued pacing the table in silence. “Or not to forgive? To forgive or not to forgive?” Finally, he answered: “Forgive!” Zlobin won the prize. Stalin then attacked anti-Semitism: he had lately insisted that Jewish writers must have their Semitic names published in brackets after their Russian pseudonyms. Now he asked the surprised Committee: “What’s this for? Does it give pleasure to someone to underline that this man is Jewish? Why? To promote anti-Semitism?” As usual the old fox was playing several games in parallel.

He had always been interested in the study of linguistics: the field had been dominated by Professor Marr who had established Stalinist orthodoxy by arguing that language, like class, would ultimately disappear and merge into one language as Communism approached. A Georgian linguistics scholar, Arnold Chikobava, wrote to Stalin to attack the theory. Stalin, keen to buttress his national Bolshevism by overturning Marrism, summoned Chikobava to a dinner that lasted from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. taking notes diligently like a student. He then held an open debate in Pravda , finally intervening with his own article, “Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics” which immediately altered the entire field of Soviet science and ideology. [301] Chikobava told Stalin that some of his Armenian colleagues had been sacked for sharing his views so Stalin immediately got the Armenian boss, Arutinov, on the telephone and asked about the professors. “They were removed from their posts,” replied Arutinov. “You were in too much of a hurry,” replied Stalin and hung up. The professors were woken up immediately and restored to their positions. His meeting with Chikobava probably took place on 12 April 1950 just as he was discussing the timing of the Korean War; Stalin’s article was published on 20 June that year. Chikobava’s original letter was sent to Stalin by Candide Charkviani, then Georgian First Secretary, which shows the power of those with direct access to the Vozhd .