On 10 February, Stalin summoned the Yugoslavs and Bulgarians to the Little Corner to humiliate them, as if they were impudent Politburo members. Instead of opposing the Bulgarian–Yugoslav plan, he proposed a collage of little federations, linking countries that already hated each other. Stalin was “glowering and doodling ceaselessly.”
“When I say no it means no!” said Stalin who instead proposed that Yugoslavia swallow Albania, making gobbling gestures with his fingers and gulping sounds with his lips. The scowling threesome—Stalin, Zhdanov and Molotov—only hardened Tito’s resistance.
Stalin and Molotov despatched an eight-page letter implying that Tito was guilty of that heinous sin—Trotskyism. “We think Trotsky’s political career is sufficiently instructive,” they wrote ominously but the Yugoslavs did not care. On 12 April, they rejected the letter. Stalin decided to crush Tito.
“I’ll shake my little finger,” he ranted at Khrushchev, “and there’ll be no more Tito!” But Tito proved a tougher nut than Trotsky or Bukharin.2
At Kuntsevo dinners, Zhdanov, the heir apparent but increasingly a frail alcoholic with a sick heart, “sometimes lost the willpower to control himself” and reached for the drink. Then Stalin “shouted at him to stop drinking,” one of the rare moments he tried to restrain the boozing, a sign of Zhdanov’s special place. But at other times, the pasty-faced, sanctimonious Zhdanov, sitting prissily and soberly while Stalin swore at Tito and smirked at scatological jokes, outraged him: “Look at him sitting there like Christ as if nothing was any concern to him! There—looking at me now as if he were Christ!”
Zhdanov blanched, his face covered with beads of perspiration. Svetlana, who was present, gave him a glass of water but this was only a routine eruption of Stalin’s blazing temper that usually passed as suddenly as it struck. Nonetheless, Stalin was increasingly irritated by Zhdanov’s over-familiar smugness and independence of mind. Beria and Malenkov were aided in their vengefulness from a surprising quarter.
Chosen by Stalin, growing closer to Svetlana and, at twenty-eight, Head of the CC Science Department, Yury Zhdanov was cock of the walk. He took his science as seriously as his father took culture. Yury resented the absurd dominance of Trofim Lysenko in the field of genetics: the scientific charlatan had used Stalin’s backing during the Terror to purge the genetics establishment of genuine scientists.
“Yury, don’t tangle with Lysenko,” Zhdanov jokingly warned his son. “He’ll cross you with a cucumber.” But Zhdanov may have been too ill to stop him.
On 10 April, 1948, young Zhdanov attacked both Lysenko’s so-called creative Darwinism and his suppression of scientists and their ideas, in a speech at the Moscow Polytechnic. Lysenko listened to the lecture through a speaker in a nearby office. This experienced courtier appealed to Stalin, attacking Yury’s impudence in speaking for the Party “in his own name.” Lysenko copied the letter to Malenkov who supported him. Wheels were turning. Malenkov sent the lecture to Stalin who now believed himself the “Coryphaeus”—the “choirmaster”—of science. He read Yury’s lecture with mounting disdain: “Ha-ha-ha!” he scribbled angrily. “Nonsense!” and “Get out!”
The impertinent puppy had contradicted Stalin’s views on heredity and evolution, and usurped his personal authority. When Yury claimed that these were his own personal views, Stalin exclaimed: “Aha!” and forwarded his comments to a delighted Malenkov.
Frustrated by Yugoslav resistance, tension in Berlin, and Zionist intrigues, Stalin had decided this was the moment to challenge America in Europe. He demanded Party discipline; Yury had flouted it. In an Olympian flash that changed Soviet science and politics, Coryphaeus intervened.
On 10 June, Stalin held one of his set-piece humiliation sessions in the Little Corner. Andrei Zhdanov humbly took notes at the front, his son lurked at the back while Stalin, pacing, “pipe in hand and puffing frequently,” muttered: “How did anyone dare insult Comrade Lysenko?” Zhdanov miserably noted Stalin’s words in his exercise book: “Report is wrong. ZHDANOV HAS BEEN MISTAKEN.” Then Stalin stopped and asked: “Who authorized it?”
His gaze chilled the room. “There was the silence of the grave,” wrote Shepilov, a Zhdanov protégé. Everyone looked down. Shepilov stood up to admit: “The decision was mine, Comrade Stalin.”
Stalin walked up to him and stared into his eyes. “I can honestly say,” recalled Shepilov, “I never saw such a look… His eyes seemed to possess some incredible force. Their yellow pupils transfixed me like… a cobra coiled to strike.” Stalin “did not blink for what seemed eternity.” Then he demanded: “Why did you do it?”
Shepilov tried to explain but Stalin interrupted: “We’ll set up a committee to clarify all the facts. The guilty must be punished. Not Yury Zhdanov, he’s still young,” but he pointed his pipe at “the Pianist”: “It’s necessary to punish the fathers.” Then, in a terrible silence, slowly pacing, he listed the members of the committee—Malenkov… but no Zhdanovs! Stalin deliberately waited until the end. Did this mean the Zhdanovshchina was over? “After long thought, Stalin uttered, ‘And Zhdanov,’ leaving a long silence before adding, ‘Senior.’”
Yury wrote an apology to Stalin, citing his own “inexperience”: “I unquestionably committed a whole series of grave mistakes.” Malenkov masterfully manipulated the unintentional impudence of Zhdanov junior to pull himself back into the centre: the apology was published in Pravda . But Stalin himself had engineered Zhdanov’s eclipse. The humiliation worsened Zhdanov’s health: he must have wished he had emulated the Berias and Malenkovs who kept their children far from politics.3
On 19 June, an exhausted Zhdanov, accompanied by his rival Malenkov, arrived at the second Cominform meeting in Bucharest to preside over the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the fold. “We possess information,” Zhdanov declared absurdly, “that Tito is an Imperialist spy.” The Yugoslavs were excommunicated.
On 24 June, Stalin imposed the Berlin Blockade, challenging the Western Allies and hoping to force them out by closing land supplies to their zone deep in Soviet East Germany. Both these challenges could only accelerate the vicious campaign against Jews in Moscow and the venomous fight for Stalin’s succession. It is usually claimed that Zhdanov had supported the Yugoslavs and therefore was blamed for the rift. Zhdanov and Voznesensky had indeed known the Yugoslavs well since 1945 but they not only supported Stalin’s stance but accelerated it by bringing Tito’s antics to his notice.
The Yugoslav schism was the unnecessary result of Stalin’s own obstinacy. While the country worshipped Stalin the God, familiarity bred contempt. By 1948, Djilas believed Stalin was “showing conspicuous signs of senility,” comparing everything to distant memories of his childhood or Siberian exiles: “Yes I remember the same things…” then “laughing at inanities and shallow jokes.” His own men observed his intellectual decline and dangerous unpredictability: “old and addled, we started to lose respect for him,” said Khrushchev. Beria too had gone through the same “evolution”—starting with zealous worship and ending with disillusion. But most of the magnates, particularly Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich and Khrushchev, remained fanatical believers in Marxism-Leninism, while virtually all of them, including Malenkov who saw himself as a civil servant chinovnik, believed Stalin was still on the side of history, for all his faults.4