On Jewish New Year, Meir attended the Moscow Great Synagogue: jubilant Jews waited outside because the synagogue was full yet it was hardly a riot. Even Polina Molotova, now fifty-three, made an appearance. At Molotov’s 7 November diplomatic reception, Polina met Golda Meir, two formidable, intelligent women from almost identical backgrounds.
Polina spoke Yiddish, the language of her childhood, which she always used when she met Mitteleuropeans, though she tactfully called it “the Austrian language.” Meir asked how she knew Yiddish. “Ikh bin a yidishe tokhter,” replied Polina. “I’m a daughter of the Jewish people.” As they parted, Polina said, “If things go well for you, then things will be good for Jews all over the world.” Perhaps she did not know how Stalin resented her pushy intelligence, snobbish elegance, Jewish background, American businessman brother and, as he told Svetlana, “bad influence on Nadya.” Her sacking in May was a warning but she did not know that Stalin had considered murdering her in 1939.[282]
The synagogue “demonstration” and Polina’s Yiddish schtick outraged the old man on holiday, confirming that Soviet Jews were becoming an American Fifth Column. No wonder Molotov had supported a Jewish Crimea. On 20 November, the Politburo dismantled the Jewish Committee and unleashed an anti-Semitic terror, managed by Malenkov and Abakumov. Mikhoels’s colleagues were now arrested, together with some brilliant Jewish writers and scientists, from the Yiddish poet Perets Markish to the biochemist Lina Shtern. They also arrested the father of Svetlana’s newly divorced husband: “The entire older generation’s contaminated with Zionism,” Stalin lectured her, “and now they’re teaching the young people too.”
Stalin ordered the prisoners to be tortured to implicate Polina Molotova while spending the steamy evenings over dinner at Coldstream, telling Charkviani folksy tales of his childhood. He suddenly missed his old friends, particularly a priest named Peter Kapanadze with whom he had studied at the seminary. After the Revolution, the priest had become a teacher but Stalin sometimes sent him money. Now he invited Kapanadze and MGB Lieut.-Gen. Sasha Egnatashvili, the Gori family friend whom Stalin called “the innkeeper’s son,” to a dinner party. Charkviani hurried back to Tiflis to gather the guests. The seven old friends were soon singing Georgian songs led by the “host with the sweet voice.” Stalin insisted that some of them stay for a week by which time, like all his guests, they were desperate to escape. Finally one of them displayed considerable ingenuity by singing a folk song at dinner with the refrain: “Better go than stay!”
“Oh I see,” said Stalin, “you’re bored. You must be missing your grandchildren.”
“No, Soso,” replied the guest. “It’s impossible to be bored here but we’ve been here almost a week, wasting your time…” Stalin let them go, returning on 2 December to Moscow, brooding about the dangerous duplicity of Molotov. He had discovered (probably from Vyshinsky) that Molotov had travelled alone in a special railway carriage from New York to Washington when he had perhaps received instructions to undermine the USSR with a Jewish homeland. It was Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s alter ego, who “started to hint” to Molotov: “Why did they assign you a special car?” Molotov put “two and two together” but there was nothing he could do.
Amazingly, it was an opera that finally convinced Stalin to move against the Molotovs. Soon after his return, Stalin saw an Armenian opera, Almast, that told the story of a prince whose wife betrays him. “He saw treason could be anywhere with anyone” but especially among the wives of the great. Stalin, fortified operatically and armed with Abakumov’s testimonies, confronted Molotov with Polina’s guilt. “He and I quarrelled about it,” said Molotov.
“It’s time for you to divorce your wife,” said Stalin. Molotov agreed, partly because he was a Bolshevik but partly because obedience might save the woman he loved.
When he told her the charges against her, she shrieked: “And you believe them! If this is what the Party needs, we’ll divorce,” she agreed. In its queer way, it was a most romantic divorce, with both sacrificing themselves to save the other. “They discussed how to save the family,” says their grandson. Polina moved in with her sister. They waited nervously but, said Molotov, “a black cat had crossed our path.”
Stalin ordered Malenkov and Abakumov to put together the Jewish Case. Malenkov insisted to Beria that he was not anti-Semitic: “Lavrenti, you know I’m Macedonian. How can you suspect me of Russian chauvinism?”
Since its centrepiece was the plan for the Jewish Crimea, on 13 January 1949 Malenkov summoned Lozovsky, ex-overlord of the Jewish Committee, to Old Square for an interrogation. This was already a matter of life and death for Lozovsky—but it also had its dangers for that punctilious but murderous “clerk” Malenkov, because his eldest daughter Volya was married to the son of a Jewish official named Shamberg whose sister was married to Lozovsky.
“You sympathized…” with the Jewish Crimea, said Malenkov, “and the idea was vicious!” Stalin ordered Lozovsky’s arrest.
Malenkov extricated his family from its Jewish connections. Volya Malenkova divorced Shamberg. Every history repeats that Stalin ordered this divorce and that Malenkov enforced it. Volya Malenkova vigorously denies this, claiming that the marriage had not worked because Shamberg had married her for the wrong reasons—and had “bad artistic taste.” “My father even discouraged me saying, ‘Think carefully and seriously. You rushed into the marriage. Careful before rushing out of it.’” But this was not how it appeared to Shamberg, who was summoned to Malenkov’s office. Just as Vasily Stalin accelerated Svetlana’s divorce, so Malenkov’s bodyguard fixed Volya’s.[283]
As many as 110 prisoners, most of them Jews, were suffering “French wrestling” at the hands of the vicious Komarov in the Lubianka. “I was merciless with them,” boasted Komarov later, “I tore their souls apart… The Minister himself didn’t scare them as much as me… I was especially pitiless with (and I hated the most) the Jewish nationalists.” When Abakumov questioned the distinguished scientist Lina Shtern, he shouted at her: “You old whore… Come clean! You’re a Zionist agent!” Komarov asked Lozovsky which leaders “had Jewish wives,” adding, “no one is untouchable.” The prisoners were also encouraged to implicate the Jewish magnates, Kaganovich and Mekhlis, but Polina Molotova was the true target. Abakumov told Stalin that she had “contacts with persons who turned out to be Enemies of the People”; she attended synagogue once, advised Mikhoels, “attended his funeral and showed concern for his family.”
Five days later, Stalin gathered the Politburo to read out the bizarre sexual-Semitic accusations against Polina. A young man testified about having had an affair and “group sex” with this Bolshevik matron. Molotov could hardly believe this “terrible filth” but, as Stalin read on, he realised that “Security had done a thorough job on her!” Even the iron-bottomed Molotov was scared: “My knees trembled.” Kaganovich, who disliked Molotov, and as a Jew had to prove his loyalty, viciously attacked Iron-Arse, recalling how “Molotov couldn’t say anything!”
Polina was expelled from the Party for “close relations with Jewish nationalists” despite being warned in 1939, when Molotov had abstained on a similar vote. Now, remarkably, he abstained again but sensing the gravity of the case, he buckled. “When the Central Committee voted on the proposal to expel PS Zhemchuzhina… I abstained which I acknowledge to be politically incorrect,” he wrote to Stalin on 20 January 1949. “I hereby declare that after thinking the matter over, I now vote in favour… I acknowledge I was gravely at fault in not restraining in time a person close to me from taking false steps and from dealings with such anti-Soviet nationalists as Mikhoels…”
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Some Jews were sacked. Kaganovich continued as Deputy Premier and Politburo member but his elder brother Yuli lost his job. Like Polina, Kaganovich’s grandson recalls that Lazar too remembered the Yiddish of his childhood: when he met the German Communist Ernest Thalman he tried to use it. The “second lady of the state,” Andreyev’s wife Dora Khazan, was sacked as Deputy Minister of Textiles and General Khrulev’s Jewish wife was arrested. Mekhlis, like Kaganovich, continued as Minister of State Control and only retired in 1950 after a stroke. The Jewish Boris Vannikov continued to run the First Directorate of Sovmin in charge of the nuclear project.
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Shamberg “was heartbroken,” according to his friend Julia Khrushcheva. Both Svetlana Stalin and Volya Malenkova are adamant that they ended unhappy marriages but there can have been no greater incentive to end an unhappy Jewish marriage than the seething anti-Semitic paranoia of Stalin. Stalin did not need to say a word. The young people knew what to do. To Malenkov’s meagre credit, he managed to protect the Shambergs themselves, hiding the boy’s father Mikhail in the provinces. “Volya” was a name invented by Malenkov, meaning “Will” as in the People’s Will.