Nevertheless, the negative stories, and the proclivity to believe whatever the state said, had a chilling social effect. Irina Dubrovina, who lived in St. Petersburg in January 1953, remembered that she was waiting in the lab with top chemistry students for a job placement when the radio blared out news of the Doctors’ Plot: “We simply stopped breathing. Among us the Jews were the very best students. The very best, whom we treated as equals.” Suddenly they were all wreckers and murderers—at least that was what they heard. Then the students parted “without saying a word to each other. That’s how well we were all trained, that ideology—it was necessary to say nothing about anything. We understood everything.” How could it be true? “We had been raised to believe that all nationalities were the same, that we were internationalists, that we welcome everyone.” She and a few others tried a mild protest that got nowhere, and for that act of disobedience, she ended up with a teaching position in the remote mountains of Chechnya.18
That story illustrates one of the insidious ways in which official anti-Semitism spread. Alexander Yakovlev remembered those times as well. He was only twenty-eight, a member of the party and working in Yaroslavl, a city about 160 miles northeast of Moscow. In early 1953 he was superintendent for schools and higher education. He was summoned by Comrade Shkiryatov, the chairman of the Party Control Commission, its main repressive body, and he was told to bring along his list of personnel. Shkiryatov had a letter of denunciation claiming that Yakovlev did not understand Kremlin policy on cosmopolitanism and had therefore failed to promote it. For his incompetence, he “would have to be punished.” As he left the office, he limped, and when Shkiryatov asked about the problem and learned that it was the result of a war injury, he changed his mind. Yakovlev knew he was lucky to escape, but realized that another victim would have to be found to take his place.19
Yakovlev later became the chair of Russia’s Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression. His foundation has published numerous volumes of documents on Stalin’s dictatorship. It is his educated opinion that indeed in February 1953, “preparations for mass deportation of Jews from Moscow and other major industrial centers to the northern and eastern regions” had begun. With Stalin’s death, “a new bloodbath was averted.”20
Stalin allowed the anti-Semitic mania to creep into his own family. During the war his seventeen-year-old daughter, Svetlana, had a flirtatious relationship with the fascinating Alexei Kapler, twice her age, a known womanizer, married, and also Jewish. Stalin was offended on all counts, and Kapler was lucky to escape with his life. Then Svetlana fell hard for Beria’s son Sergo, though that relationship did not last. In 1944 she met Grigori Morozov, who was Jewish. Although her father did not approve, he did not stand in the way of their marriage. However, he never gave them his blessing and refused to meet his new son-in-law, let alone allow the couple to remain in the Kremlin, and he forced their separation in 1947. The marriage became intolerable to Stalin when he learned that JAFC leader Mikhoels and others hoped to gain access to political influence by using the Stalin family connection. Morosov was whisked away, as were other Stalin relatives. At the end of 1948, Stalin told Sventlana that they all worked for a “Zionist center.” The Zionists “threw that first husband your way,” he said, and the older generation of Jews was teaching Zionism to the young.21
As part of the investigation of the JAFC, the police collected evidence on Molotov’s Jewish wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina. Stalin had read out her dossier at a Politburo gathering in late 1948. It was filled with lies about her sexual exploits that had been extorted from others already in custody. She was a notable person with a successful career, and Stalin had made her a commissar for fisheries in 1939. Once she had prided herself as the best-dressed woman in the USSR, and now she was damned.22 The Boss demanded that the Politburo expel her from the party and that the couple divorce. The noblest interpretation of the couple’s obedience to his command was that Molotov wanted to save her and that she agreed in the hope that the family would be spared.23
Commissar Molotov provides an alternative view in his memoirs, which paints the two of them as totally dedicated to the cause. When Polina heard what Stalin had said, she supposedly turned to her husband and without complaint remarked: “If it is necessary for the Party, then we divorce.” She was arrested, imprisoned for a year, and sent to the camps for three more. Molotov initially abstained from voting for her expulsion from the party, but soon in a note to Stalin, he admitted his political mistake, favored throwing her out, and expressed remorse for not preventing her from forging links “with anti-Soviet Jewish nationalists.”24 After she was sent away, he apparently made little or no effort to find out where she was. This episode bespeaks the cowardice of the man whose name has become synonymous with subservience and brutality. In regard to his wife, his conscience could be assuaged by the friendly gesture of Beria, who took to whispering in his ear at meetings: “She is alive, alive!”
Molotov’s reminiscences reek of self-deception and offer glimpses of a servant mentality trying to justify a brutal regime and his own complicity in it. It is hard to accept the account he gives of Polina’s return from the camps. The first thing on her mind, he claims, was the leader’s welfare. Not aware that Stalin had died, she wanted to know how he was doing. Molotov writes as if he needed to clear his wife’s good name, and it seems hardly to have occurred to him that she was an innocent victim. But perhaps it did, and the thought of her innocence made him try harder to convince not just others but himself that it was all for the greater good. He recalled, after Polina passed away, that she had never cursed Stalin and that she had chastised others if they spoke ill of him: she was a “genuine Bolshevik, a real Soviet person.”25
Even “sensible people” like Konstantin Simonov became entangled in the latest conspiracy mania. He readily adopted a strong anticosmopolitan stance, which pleased Stalin, and in 1950, as a reward, he put the writer in charge of one of the country’s top literary newspapers, the Literaturnaia Gazeta. It was “expected” that he would continue his vigilance, and indeed Simonov dismissed all the Jews right away—for their “poor work and political mistakes.” Then he was elevated to the Central Committee, where he heard Stalin’s last speeches and wondered about the remarks on the Jews. But in his own life he was unrelenting, and on March 24, 1953, he came up with a list of Jewish writers who should be purged from the Union of Soviet Writers, in effect ending their careers. His letter, written two weeks after the dictator died, would have been given a stamp of approval by Stalin.26
Yuri Slezkine, whose own family experienced this upheaval, observes that for the Jews, with their expulsions from the party and the loss of their jobs, the slanderous charges meant that the dreams and hopes that many of them had associated with the Soviet belief system were over. “The great alliance between the Jewish Revolution and Communism was coming to an end as a result of the new crusade against Jewish Communists. What Hitler could not accomplish, Stalin did, and as Stalin did, so did his representatives in other places.”27
LAST PARTY CONGRESS
Behind his drive to uncover the “truth” about the Jews and his hope to finish his book, Stalin seemed to sense the imminence of death. That was also why he called the Nineteenth Party Congress, which opened on October 5, 1952, the first time it had met in thirteen years. More than 1,300 delegates and Communist leaders from around the world gathered at the Great Kremlin Palace. Just days before, in Pravda, Stalin had published his brief account of “The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR.” These were his “remarks” on the economics book, and he let it be known that they represented his political report to the meeting.