Encouraged by this growing sympathy, Mikhoels and his colleague Fefer, a poet[263] and MGB plant, suggested a Jewish republic in the Crimea (now empty of Tartars), or in Saratov (now empty of the Volga Germans) to Molotov and his deputy in charge of the JAFC, Lozovsky. Molotov thought the Volga German idea ridiculous, “it’s impossible to see a Jew on a tractor,” but preferred the Crimea: “Why don’t you write a memorandum to me and Comrade Stalin, and we’ll see.”
“Everyone,” recalls Vladimir Redens, “believed Jewish Crimea would happen.” Molotov, showing more independence than before, may have discussed this with Beria but his judgement almost cost him his life. Most of those involved were dead within five years.
On 2 February 1944 Mikhoels delivered his letter to Molotov, copied to Stalin who now decided that the actor had moved from Soviet to Jewish propaganda. Stalin, with his acute awareness of anti-Semitism, sent Kaganovich to pour cold water on the idea of this “Jewish California”: “Only actors and poets could come up with such a scheme,” he said, that was “worth nothing in practice!” Zhdanov supervised the making of lists of Jews in different departments and recommended closing down the JAFC.[264] Like Molotov in 1939, Zhdanov loosed his hounds against Jews in the apparat which, he said, had become “some kind of synagogue.”
Stalin’s anti-Semitism remained a mixture of old-fashioned prejudice, suspicion of a people without a land, and distrust, since his enemies were often Jewish. He was so unabashed that he openly told Roosevelt at Yalta that the Jews were “middlemen, profiteers and parasites.” But after 1945, there was a change: Stalin emerged as a vicious and obsessional anti-Semite.
Always supremely political, this was partly a pragmatic judgement: it matched his new Russian nationalism. The supremacy of America with its powerful Jewish community made his own Jews, with their U.S. connections restored during the war, appear a disloyal Fifth Column. His suspicion of the Jews was another facet of his inferiority complex towards America as well as a symptom of his fear of the new self-assertive confidence of his own victorious people. It was also a way to control his old comrades whose Jewish connections symbolized their new cosmopolitan confidence after victory. Equally, he loathed any people with mixed loyalties: he noticed the Holocaust had touched and awakened Soviet Jewry even among the magnates. His new anti-Semitism flowed from his own seething paranoia, exacerbated when Fate entangled the Jews in his family.
Yet he still played the internationalist, often attacking people for antiSemitism and rewarding Jews in public, from Mekhlis to the novelist Ehrenburg. Soon this malevolent whirlpool threatened to consume Molotov, Beria and his own clan.1
“As soon as hostilities end,” Stalin said at Yalta, “the soldiers are forgotten and lapse into oblivion.” He wished this was so but the prestige of Marshal Zhukov had never been higher. The Western press even acclaimed him as Stalin’s successor. Stalin liked Zhukov but “didn’t recognize personal ties” and he probed to see if this idea had any support.
“I’m getting old,” he casually told Budyonny, his old pal and Zhukov’s friend. “What do you think of Zhukov succeeding me?”
“I approve of Zhukov,” he replied, “but he’s a complicated character.”
“You managed to govern him,” said Stalin, “and I can manage him too.”
Stalin “managed” Zhukov by using the Aviators’ Case against him, torturing Air Marshal Novikov to implicate him.[265] “Broken morally, brought to desperation, sleepless nights, I signed,” admitted Novikov later. Abakumov tortured seventy other generals to get the necessary evidence. In March, Zhukov was recalled to Moscow. Instead of reporting directly to the Generalissimo, he was summoned by Stalin’s deputy as Armed Forces Minister, Bulganin, “the Plumber” (as Beria called him) who was in high favour. Zhukov grumbled at Bulganin’s arrogance and Bulganin grumbled that Zhukov had pulled rank on him, resisting orders from the Party. Stalin ordered “the Plumber” to prepare a kangaroo court against Zhukov.
Abakumov searched Zhukov’s homes which turned out to be an Aladdin’s cave of booty: “We can simply say,” Abakumov reportedly gleefully to Stalin, “that Zhukov’s dacha is a museum,” filled with gold, 323 furs, 400 metres of velvet and silk. There were so many paintings, some even hung in the kitchen. Zhukov even went so far as to hang over his bed “a huge canvas depicting two naked women… we did not find a single Soviet book.” Then there were “twenty unique shotguns from Holland & Holland.”
They left the trophies (returning for them in 1948) but for now they bizarrely confiscated a doll of one of the Marshal’s daughters, and his memoirs: “Leave history writing to the historians,” Stalin warned Zhukov.
In early June, Zhukov was summoned to the Supreme Military Council. Stalin strode in “as gloomy as a black cloud.” Without a word, he tossed a note to Shtemenko.
“Read it,” he snapped. Shtemenko read out Novikov’s testimony that Zhukov had claimed credit for the Soviet victory, criticized Stalin and created his own clique. He had even awarded a medal to the starlet Lydia Ruslanova, with whom he may have been having an affair.
This was “intolerable,” declared Stalin, turning to the generals. Budyonny (who had been coached by Bulganin) vaguely criticized his friend but not damningly. Zhukov’s rival, Koniev, called him difficult but honest. Only Golikov, whom Zhukov had removed from the Voronezh Front in 1943, really denounced him. But Molotov, Beria and Bulganin attacked the Marshal for “Bonapartism,” demanding that Zhukov “be put in his place.” Zhukov defended himself but admitted to having inflated his importance.
“What shall we do with Zhukov?” asked Stalin who, typically, had expressed no opinion. The potentates wanted him repressed, the soldiers did not. Stalin, seeing this was not 1937, suggested demoting Zhukov to the Odessa Military District. The Terror against the victors was a deliberate policy, with Admiral Kuznetzov, among others, arrested (though also only demoted). Ex-Marshal Kulik was bugged grumbling on his telephone that politicians were stealing the credit from the soldiers. This was heresy: he was quietly shot in 1950. Zhukov himself was expelled from the CC, his trophies confiscated, friends tortured, and then further demoted to the Urals. He suffered a heart attack but Stalin never let Abakumov arrest him for planning a Bonapartist coup: “I don’t trust anyone who says Zhukov could do this. I know him very well. He’s a straightforward, sharp person able to speak plainly to anyone but he’ll never go against the CC.”
Finally Stalin demonstrated the subordination of the generals by writing this note to the Politburo: “I propose Comrade Bulganin be promoted to Marshal for his distinction in the Patriotic War.” In case anyone wished to query “the Plumber’’ ’s utterly undistinguished war—and civilian—record, Stalin added: “I think my reason requires no discussion—it’s absolutely clear.”2
Zhukov was not alone in his “museum” of gold and paintings. Corruption is the untold story of Stalin’s post-war Terror: the magnates and marshals plundered Europe with the avarice of Göring, though with much more justification after what the Germans had done to Russia. This imperial élite cast aside much of their old “Bolshevik modesty.” Yet “Comrade Stalin,” foreign visitors were told, “cannot endure immorality” though he had always believed that conquerors could help themselves to some booty and local girls. He laughed about the luxuries of his generals with their courtesans and batmen yet his archives overflow with denunciations of corruption which he usually filed away for later.
263
Fefer was the author of an absurd poem during WWII called “I a Jew” in which he praised the great Jewish Bolsheviks from King Solomon to Marx, Sverdlov and “Stalin’s friend Kaganovich” which no doubt enormously embarrassed the latter.
264
Zhdanov’s chief ideological anti-Semite was the tall, thin and ascetic CC Secretary Mikhail Suslov, who had played a key role in the Caucasian deportations and then served as Stalin’s proconsul in the Baltics which he brutally purged after the war. Working alternately under both Zhdanov and Malenkov, he became one of Stalin’s youngish protégés.
265
Churchill himself had bouts of jealousy of his generals: “Monty wants to fill the Mall when he gets his baton! And he will not fill the Mall,” Churchill told Sir Alan Brooke on his way back from Moscow in October 1944. “He will fill the Mall because he is Monty and I will not have him filling the Mall!” It was, wrote Brooke, “a strange streak of almost unbelievable petty jealousy on his part… Those that got between him and the sun did not meet his approval.” There was a great tradition of rulers jealous of, and threatened by, brilliant but overmighty generals: Emperor Justinian humiliated Belisarius; Emperor Paul did the same to Suvorov.