Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Andreyev was accompanied on these manic trips by a plump young man of thirty-five, Georgi Malenkov, the killer bureaucrat whose career benefited the most from the Purges but who hailed from the provincial intelligentsia, a scion of Tsarist civil servants, and a nobleman. [124] Lenin, Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky, and the Foreign Commissar until 1930, Chicherin, were hereditary noblemen, as were Molotov, Zhdanov, Sergo and Tukhachevsky, according to Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks which decreed rank until 1917. None were titled nobility. He travelled with Mikoyan to Armenia and Yezhov to Belorussia. One historian estimates that Malenkov was responsible for 150,000 deaths.

Small, flabby, pale and moon-faced with a hairless chin, freckles across his nose and dark, slightly Mongol eyes, his black hair hanging across his forehead, Malenkov had broad, female hips, a pear shape and a high voice. It is no wonder that Zhdanov nicknamed him “Malanya” or Melanie. “It seemed that under the layers and rolls of fat,” a lean and hungry man was trying to get out. His great-great-grandfather had come from Macedonia during the reign of Nicholas I but, as Beria joked, he was hardly Alexander the Great. Malenkov’s ancestors had governed Orenburg for the Tsars. Descended from generals and admirals, he saw himself in the tradition of a posadnik , an elected administrator of old Novgorod, or a chinovnik like his forefathers. Unlike Stalinist bullies such as Kaganovich, who shouted and punched officials, Malenkov stood when subordinates entered his room and spoke quietly in fine Russian without swearing, though what he said was often chilling.

Malenkov’s father had shocked the family by marrying a formidable blacksmith’s daughter who had three sons. Georgi, who loved his dominant mother, was the youngest. He studied at the local classical Gymnasium , learning Latin and French. Malenkov, like Zhdanov, passed among cobblers and joiners for an educated man, qualifying as an electrical engineer. Like many other ambitious youngsters, he joined the Party during the Civil War: his family unconvincingly claim that he rode in the cavalry but he was soon on safer ground on the propaganda trains where he met his domineering wife, Valeria Golubseva, who came from a similar background.

Happily married, Malenkov was known as a wonderful father to his highly educated children, teaching them himself and reading them poetry even when he was exhausted at the height of the war. His wife helped get him a job in the Central Committee where he was noticed by Molotov, joined Stalin’s Secretariat and became secretary of the Politburo during the early thirties, one of those keen young men like Yezhov who won first Kaganovich’s, then Stalin’s notice, for their devotion and efficiency. Yet in company, he had a light sense of humour.

This cunning but “eunuch-like” magnate never spoke unless necessary and always listened to Stalin, scribbling in a notebook headed “Comrade Stalin’s Instructions.” He succeeded Yezhov as head of the CC Personnel Registration department that selected cadres for jobs. In 1937, Mikoyan said, he played a “special role.” He was the bureaucratic maestro of the Terror. One note in Stalin’s papers laconically illustrates their relationship:

“Comrade Malenkov—Moskvin must be arrested. J.St.” The young stars Malenkov, Khrushchev and Yezhov were such close friends, they were called “the Inseparables.” Yet in this paranoic lottery, even a Malenkov could be destroyed. In 1937, he was accused at a Moscow Party Conference of being an Enemy himself. He was talking about joining the Red Army in Orenburg during the Civil War when a voice cried out: “Were there Whites in Orenburg at the time?”

“Yes—”

“That means you were with them.”

Khrushchev intervened: “The Whites may have been in Orenburg at the time but Comrade Malenkov was not one of them.” It was a time when hesitation could lead to arrest. 13Simultaneously, Khrushchev saved his own skin by going to Stalin personally and confessing a spell of Trotskyism during the early twenties. 14

The entourage rabidly encouraged the Terror. Even decades later, these “fanatics” still defended their mass murder: “I bear responsibility for the repression and consider it correct,” said Molotov. “All Politburo members bear responsibility… But 1937 was necessary.” Mikoyan agreed that “everyone who worked with Stalin… bears a share of responsibility.” It was bad enough to kill so many but their complete awareness that many were innocent even by their own arcane standards is the hardest to take: “We’re guilty of going too far,” said Kaganovich. “We all made mistakes… But we won WWII.” 15Those who knew these mass murderers later reflected that Malenkov or Khrushchev were “not wicked by nature,” not “what they eventually became.” They were men of their time. 16

In October, another Plenum approved the arrest of yet more members of the Central Committee. “It happened gradually,” said Molotov. “Seventy expelled 1–15 people then sixty expelled another 15.” When a terrified local leader appealed to Stalin “to receive me for just ten minutes on personal matters—I’m accused in a terrible lie,” he scribbled in green to Poskrebyshev: “Say I’m on holiday.” 17

Yet all of this tragedy took place in a public atmosphere of jubilation, a never-ending fiesta of triumphs and anniversaries. Here is a scene from the years of the Terror that might have taken place anywhere and any time between a daughter, her best friend and her embarrassing papa. Stalin met his daughter Svetlana in his apartment for dinner daily. At the height of the Terror, Stalin dined with Svetlana, then eleven, and her best friend, Martha Peshkova, whose grandfather, Gorky, and father had both supposedly been murdered by Yagoda, her mother’s lover. Stalin wanted Svetlana to be friends with Martha, introducing them especially. Now the girls were playing in Svetlana’s room when the housekeeper came and told them Stalin was home and at table. Stalin was alone but in a very cheerful mood—he clearly adored coming home to see Svetlana for he would often appear shouting, “Where’s my khozyaika !” and then sit down and help her do her homework. Outsiders were amazed at how this harsh creature “was so gentle with his daughter.” He sat her on his knee and told one visitor: “Since her mother died, I always tell her she’s the khozyaika but she so believed it herself that she tried to give orders in the kitchen but was made to leave immediately. She was in tears but I managed to calm her down.”

That night, he teased Martha, who was very pretty but with a tendency to blush like a beetroot.

“So Marfochka, I hear you are being chased by all the boys?” Martha was so embarrassed she could not swallow her soup or answer. “So many boys are chasing you!” Stalin persisted. Svetlana came to her rescue: “Come on, Papa, leave her alone.” Stalin laughed and agreed, saying he always obeyed his darling khozyaika .

Dinner, recalled Martha, “was miserable for me,” but she was not afraid of Stalin because she had known him since childhood. Yet nothing was quite what it seemed for these children: so many of Svetlana’s parents’ friends had disappeared. Martha had just seen [125] Martha and her mother had been invited to Tiflis for the celebration of the poet Rustaveli’s 750th anniversary by Timosha’s new lover, Academician Lupel. There, through a slit in the door, she had seen him arrested at the dead of night: “I saw five men take him away,” she remembered. Timosha’s later affair with Stalin’s court architect, Merzhanov, also ended in his arrest. “I’m cursed,” Timosha Peshkova exclaimed. “Everyone I touch is ruined.” her mother’s new lover arrested. 1