Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Just the servants and family remained: “cooks, chauffeurs and watchmen, gardeners and women who waited at table” now emerged out of the background “to say goodbye.” Many were sobbing, with rough bodyguards wiping their eyes with their sleeves “like children.” A weeping old nurse gave them valerian drops. Svetlana watched numbly. Some servants started to turn off the lights and tidy up.

Then Stalin’s closest companion, the comfort of the cruel loneliness of this unparalleled monster, Valechka, who was now aged thirty-eight and had worked with Stalin since she was twenty, pushed through the crying maids, “dropped heavily to her knees” and threw herself onto the corpse with all the uninhibited grief of the ordinary people. This cheerful but utterly discreet woman, who had seen so much, was convinced to her dying day that “no better man ever walked the earth.” Laying her head squarely on his chest, Valechka, with tears pouring down the cheeks of “her round face,” “wailed at the top of her voice as the women in the villages do. She went on for a long time and nobody tried to stop her.” 1

Stalin was embalmed. On 9 March 1953, Molotov, Beria and Khrushchev spoke at his funeral, after which he was laid in the Mausoleum beside Lenin. Polina Molotova was still in the Lubianka. The next day, Beria invited Molotov to his office there. When Molotov arrived, Beria rushed ahead to greet Polina: “A heroine!” he declared. Her first question was “How’s Stalin?” She fainted when she learned he was dead. Molotov took her home.

Beria moved to liberalize the regime and arrested those responsible for the Doctors’ Plot but his proposal to free East Germany provoked an uprising that alarmed the other magnates. Khrushchev began to plan Beria’s destruction. He won over Premier Malenkov and Defence Minister Bulganin. Molotov still admired Beria but agreed to support Khrushchev because of the German crisis. Surprisingly, President Voroshilov supported Beria. When he was consulted, Mikoyan said he distrusted Khrushchev because he was so close to Beria and Malenkov. Khrushchev did not tell Mikoyan the whole story, but he agreed that Beria should be demoted to Petroleum Minister. Kaganovich typically sat on the fence. But Marshal Zhukov and his generals provided the muscle.

On 25 June, Beria was swinging gaily on his hammock at his dacha, singing Georgian songs. He had been called to a special meeting of the Presidium. Nina warned him to be careful but he was not worried because he explained that Molotov supported him. At about 1 p.m. next day, Khrushchev stood up at the meeting and attacked Beria. Bulganin joined in but Mikoyan was surprised to hear that Beria was to be arrested.

“What’s going on, Nikita?” Beria asked. “Why are you searching for fleas in my trousers?” When it was Malenkov’s turn to support the coup, he lost his nerve and gave a secret signal to the generals waiting outside. Marshal Zhukov burst in and seized Beria.

Nina Beria, her son Sergo and daughter-in-law Martha Peshkova were also arrested and imprisoned. From his cell, Beria bombarded Malenkov with letters begging for his help and mercy for his family. On 22 December, he, along with Merkulov, Dekanozov and Kobulov, was sentenced to death by a secret political court for treason and terrorism, charges of which these killers were obviously innocent.

Beria was stripped to his underwear; hands manacled and attached to a hook on the wall. He frantically begged to be allowed to live, making such a noise that a towel was stuffed in his mouth. His eyes bulged over the bandage wrapped round his face. His executioner—General Batitsky (later promoted to Marshal for his role)—fired directly into Beria’s forehead. He was cremated. His protégé and then rival, Abakumov, was tried for the Leningrad Case and shot in December 1954. Many of Stalin’s crimes were blamed on them.

When the new leaders began to release prisoners, their reactions were often similar. Kira Alliluyeva, herself newly released, picked up her mother Zhenya from the Lubianka.

“So finally, Stalin saved us after all!” declared Zhenya.

“You fool!” exclaimed Kira. “Stalin’s dead!” Zhenya admired Stalin up to her death in 1974. Her sister-in-law Anna Redens, like Budyonny’s second wife, Olga, had lost her mind in confinement and never recovered. Vlasik returned broken from prison but he and Poskrebyshev remained friends, both dying in the mid-sixties.

Khrushchev emerged as the dominant leader. Malenkov was removed as Premier and replaced by Bulganin. In 1956, Khrushchev, backed by Mikoyan, famously denounced Stalin’s crimes in his “Secret Speech.” Five years later, Stalin’s body was removed from the Mausoleum and buried in the Kremlin wall.

In 1957, Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov, backed by Voroshilov and Bulganin, managed to overthrow Khrushchev in the Presidium. However, Khrushchev mobilized the Central Committee, flying in his supporters in planes organized by Marshal Zhukov.

At a Plenum, Stalin’s murderous magnates scrambled to blame one another for their crimes: “Sleeves rolled up, axe in hand, they lopped off heads,” Zhukov accused them—and Khrushchev himself. Khrushchev attacked Malenkov who replied: “Only you are completely pure, Comrade Khrushchev!” Kaganovich insisted “the whole Politburo signed” the death lists. Khrushchev accused him back but Kaganovich roared: “Didn’t you sign death warrants in Ukraine?” Finally Khrushchev shouted: “All of us taken together aren’t worth Stalin’s shit!” As a recent historian has written, “this was certainly no Nuremberg” but it was the “closest Stalin’s henchmen came to a day of reckoning.” Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov were sacked. Kaganovich and Malenkov were despatched to run a potash factory and power station respectively in distant regions. Malenkov’s daughter says her father found this minor job a calming relief; Kaganovich’s grandson reports that “Iron Lazar” immediately discarded his notorious temper and never shouted again, becoming a cosy grandfather.

Molotov became Soviet Ambassador to Mongolia and then, in 1960, Soviet Representative at the UN Atomic Agency in Vienna so that he was present, ignored in the background, when President Kennedy and Khrushchev met there with their delegations in June 1961.

Khrushchev, like Stalin before him, became Premier as well as First Secretary. Marshal Zhukov became Defence Minister as a reward for his help but his pugnacity and fame threatened the increasingly vainglorious Khrushchev who sacked him for “Bonapartism.” By 1960, when the senile Voroshilov retired as President, Khrushchev and Mikoyan were the last of Stalin’s magnates in power. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was Mikoyan who flew to Havana, accompanied by his son Sergo, to persuade Castro to agree to Khrushchev’s compromise, and then on to Washington to talk to Kennedy. Mikoyan, who had helped carry Lenin’s coffin, also attended JFK’s funeral.

After the scare of the Missile Crisis and the autocratic folly of his agricultural panaceas, Khrushchev was overthrown in 1964 by a cabal of Stalin’s young stars, Brezhnev, Kosygin and their éminence grise , Suslov, who ruled until their deaths in the eighties. Mikoyan survived even this upheaval and became President, retiring in 1965.

The old magnates found it hard to cope with their fall. They had expected to be arrested so were all relieved to be alive. When they left their apartments in the Kremlin in 1957, Kaganovich and Andreyev found they did not even own their own towels or sheets. Many of them were granted apartments in the palatial Granovsky buildings where the shrewd Molotov managed to secure two apartments as well as a dacha . Kaganovich and Malenkov retired to spartan but large apartments in another building on the Frunze Embankment but avoided each other. These famous and blood-spattered old pensioners spent their retirements writing their memoirs, receiving Stalinist admirers, avoiding the hostile stares of former victims they encountered in the street, applying for readmission to the Party, and shuffling through papers in the Lenin Library: they were non-people but spotting them became a thrilling form of living archaeology.