Simon Montefiore: Stalin

On 22 August 1946, Stalin listened to the weather forecast and was infuriated to hear that it was completely wrong. He therefore ordered Voroshilov to investigate the weather forecasters to discover if there was “sabotage” among the weathermen. It was an absurd job that reflected Stalin’s disdain for the First Marshal who reported the next day that it was unjust to blame the weather forecasters for the mistakes.

These dangers were perfectly demonstrated in 1991 when Boris Yeltsin used his Russian Presidency to demolish Gorbachev’s USSR. The moving of the capital back to Leningrad, city of Zinoviev and Kirov, had been a deadly issue in Russian politics ever since Peter the Great. Men died for it in the eighteenth century and they would die for it in 1949. Stalin was also suspicious of the popular heroism of Kuznetsov and the city of Leningrad itself during WWII. It represented an alternative totem of military patriotism to himself and Moscow.

Meanwhile just across the landing, in another apartment at Granovsky, a similar discussion in this tiny world was going on: Rada Khrushcheva, whose father was still in Kiev, was staying with her father’s friends the Malenkovs. She wanted to go to the wedding, but Malenkov, who knew how doomed Kuznetsov was, refused to give her the limousine to take her there. “I won’t give you the car—you’re not studying well.” But Rada went under her own steam.

“Dear Svetochka,” Stalin wrote to Svetlana in hospital on May 1950. “I got your letter. I’m glad you got off so lightly. Kidney trouble is a serious business. To say nothing of having a child. Where did you ever get the idea I’d abandoned you? It’s the sort of thing people dream up. I advise you not to believe your dreams. Take care of yourself. Take care of your daughter too. The State needs people even those born prematurely. Be patient a little longer—we’ll see each other soon. I kiss you my Svetochka. Your ‘little papa.’” He did not devote all his time to the Leningrad Case. During these days, he also supervised the creation of the new Soviet Encyclopaedia, deciding every detail from its quality of paper to its contents. When the editor asked if he should include “negative persons” such as Trotsky, he joked, “We’ll include Napoleon, but he was a big scoundrel!”

Sergo and Alla were convinced this was “an intrigue by Malenkov and Beria who tricked Stalin. It’s amazing we believed this,” recalls Sergo. “But we never ONCE spoke about the case until after Stalin’s death.” His father allowed Sergo to see Kuznetsov’s son but not his wife because he knew she too would be arrested. As for the Kremlin children who lived in Granovsky Street, they noticed that suddenly their neighbours, the Voznesenskys and Kuznetsovs, had gone. “But no one mentioned it,” said Igor Malenkov, whose father was responsible. “I just concentrated on reading about sport.” Julia Khrushcheva “used to play with Natasha, Voznesensky’s daughter. Soon after her father’s arrest, I brought her home to our flat. But my mother said nothing.” The etiquette of unpersonage differed from family to family: while Natasha Poskrebysheva went on playing with Natasha Voznesenskaya, Nadya Vlasik “crossed the road whenever she saw her.” I am especially grateful to Sergo Mikoyan for sharing his account of this story.

They were now the heart of Stalin’s new inner “quintet,” along with Beria and Bulganin. Kaganovich enjoyed a partial return to favour. On Sundays, those two fat bureaucrat friends, Khrushchev and Malenkov, took bracing walks up Gorky Street, surrounded by phalanxes of secret policemen.

Mao had brought a treasure trove of Chinese gifts and several carriages of rice. The lacquer ornaments still hang on the walls of Molotov’s retirement flat on Granovsky and Stalin divided the rice among his courtiers. In return, Stalin presented him with the names of his Soviet agents in the Chinese Politburo. Back in Peking, Mao swiftly liquidated them.

Emelian Pugachev was the Cossack pretender claiming to be the dead Emperor Peter 111 who led a massive peasant rebellion against Catherine the Great in 1773–74.

Stalin admired Chou and President Liu Shao-chi as the most “distinguished” of Mao’s men but he thought that Marshal Chu-Teh was a Chinese version of “our Voroshilov and Budyonny.”

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.”

“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.

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.

Vlasik was despatched to be Deputy Commandant of a labour camp in the Urals whence he rashly bombarded Stalin with protestations of his innocence. But this did not place Beria in charge of his bodyguards who remained under Ignatiev’s MGB.

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.

Georgi Dmitrov, the Bulgarian leader, died in 1949.

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.