Simultaneously, Malenkov alerted Stalin that the Leningrad Party had covered up a voting scandal and held a trade fair without government permission. He managed to connect these sins with a vague plan mooted by Zhdanov to create a Russian (as opposed to a Soviet) Party alongside the Soviet one and make Leningrad the Russian capital. These trivialities may hardly sound like crimes punishable by death but they masked the fault lines in the Soviet Imperium and Stalin’s dictatorship.[285] Besides, a Russian Party could not be led by a Georgian. Stalin championed the Russian people as the binding force of the USSR but he remained an internationalist. Voznesensky’s nationalism worried the Caucasians: “For him not only Georgians and Armenians but even Ukrainians aren’t people,” Stalin told Mikoyan. Beria must have worried about his future under the Leningraders.
Malenkov had shrewdly amassed a collage of mistakes that touched all Stalin’s sensitive places. “Go there and take a look at what’s going on,” Stalin ordered Malenkov and Abakumov who arrived in Leningrad with two trains carrying five hundred MGB officers and twenty investigators from the Sled-Chast, the department “to Investigate Especially Important Cases.” When “Stalin orders him to kill one,” Beria said, “Malenkov kills 1,000!” Malenkov attacked the local bosses, stringing together disparate strands into one lethal conspiracy. The arrests began, but Voznesensky and Kuznetsov lingered at their flats in the pink Granovsky block, convinced that Stalin would forgive them: 1937 seemed a long time ago. Even Mikoyan thought blood-letting was a thing of the past.
He had reason to hope so because his youngest son Sergo, now eighteen, was engaged to Kuznetsov’s “charming, beautiful” daughter Alla.
When her father fell, Alla gave Sergo the chance to avoid marrying an outcast: “Does it change your intentions?” But Sergo loved Alla and his parents had come to adore her “like our own daughter.” Mikoyan supported the marriage.
“And you allow this marriage? Have you gone crazy?” the pusillanimous Kaganovich whispered to Mikoyan. “Don’t you understand that Kuznetsov’s doomed? Stop the marriage.” Mikoyan was adamant. On 15 February 1949, Kuznetsov was sacked as Party Secretary and accused of “non-Bolshevik deviation” and “anti-State” separatism. Three days later, the couple got married. Kuznetsov was cheerfully oblivious, “a courageous man,” thought Mikoyan, “with no idea of Stalin’s customs.” Mikoyan gave the couple a party at Zubalovo but Kuznetsov, finally realizing his plight, telephoned Mikoyan to say he could not come because he had an “upset stomach.”
Mikoyan would not hear of it: “We’ve enough lavatories in the house! Come!”
“I’ve no car,” answered Kuznetsov. “You do better without me.”
“It’s indecent for a father to miss his daughter’s wedding,” retorted Mikoyan who sent his limousine.[286] At the party, Kuznetsov could not relax. He felt he was endangering his daughter.
“I feel unwell,” he said, “so let’s drink to our children!” Then he left.
That dangerous spring, poor Kuznetsov attended another Politburo marriage that involved the beleagured Zhdanov faction. “Stalin had always wanted me to marry Svetlana,” recalls Yury Zhdanov, still at the Central Committee. “We were childhood friends so it wasn’t daunting.” But marrying a dictator’s daughter was not so straightforward: Yury was not sure to whom he should propose, the dictator or the daughter.
He went to Stalin, who tried to dissuade him: “You don’t know her character. She’ll show you the door in no time.” But Yury persisted. “Stalin didn’t give any lectures but told me that he trusted me to look after Svetlana,” says Yury.
Stalin now played matchmaker, according to Sergo Beria: “I like that man,” Stalin told Svetlana. “He has a future and he loves you. Marry him.”
“He made his declaration of love to you?” she retorted. “He’s never looked at me.”
“Talk to him and you’ll see,” said Stalin.
Svetlana still loved Sergo Beria and told him: “You didn’t want me? Right, I’ll marry Yury Zhdanov.”
However, she became fond of “my pious Yurochka” and they agreed to marry. But “my second marriage was the choice of my father,” explained Svetlana, “and I was tired of struggling so went through with it.”
The Generalissimo did not attend the wedding party at the Zhdanovs’ dacha seven miles beyond Zubalovo along the Uspenskoye Road. The guests included another Politburo couple: Natasha, the daughter of Andreyev and Dora Khazan, was there with her husband, Vladimir Kuibyshev, the son of the late magnate. “There were also schoolmates… from comparatively ordinary families too,” remembers Stepan Mikoyan who was also a guest. Then there was dancing and a feast: Yury, like his father, played the piano. It was natural that Kuznetsov was there because he had been Zhdanov’s closest ally but everyone knew he was under a cloud.
Yury and Svetlana, along with her son Joseph Morozov, now aged four, lived with Zhdanov’s widow in the Kremlin. “I never saw my own father,” Joseph recalled. “I called Yury ‘Daddy.’ Yury loved me!”
A few days later, they were visiting Zubalovo when Vlasik called: Stalin was on his way. “What do you want to move to the Zhdanovs’ for?” he asked her. “You’ll be eaten alive by the women there. There are too many women in that house.” He wanted the young couple to move into Kuntsevo, adding a second floor but in his maladroit way he could not ask directly and probably did not want to be bothered.
Svetlana remained with the prissy widows of Zhdanov and Shcherbakov: soon she loathed her mother-in-law Zinaida who combined “Party bigotry” with “bourgeois complacency.” Her marriage was not loving: “the lesson I learned was never to go into marriage as a deal.” Sexually it was, in her words, “not a great success.” She never forgave Zinaida Zhdanova for telling her that her mother had been “mad.” However, they had a daughter, Katya, though Svetlana was so ill during the birth that she wrote to her father saying she felt abandoned and was delighted to receive his brusque reply.[287]
Besides, the wedding was not well timed for the Zhdanovs. Kuznetsov and Voznesensky were on the edge of the precipice. Yury sensed the Leningrad Affair “was undoubtedly aimed at my father” but “I wasn’t afraid then. I discovered later I should have been destroyed…” He was right: the prisoners were later tortured to implicate Zhdanov.
Stalin mulled over Kuznetsov’s fate. Poskrebyshev invited the Leningrader to dinner at Kuntsevo but Stalin refused to shake his hand: “I didn’t summon you.” Kuznetsov “seemed to shrink.” Stalin expected a letter of self-criticism from Kuznetsov but the naïve Leningrader did not send one. “It means he’s guilty,” Stalin muttered to Mikoyan.
Yet Stalin had doubts. “Isn’t it a waste not letting Vosnesensky work while we’re deciding what to do with him?” he asked Malenkov and Beria who said nothing. Then Stalin remembered that Air Marshal Novikov and Shakhurin were still in jail.
“Don’t you think it’s time to release them?” But again the duo said nothing, whispering in the bathroom that if they released Shakhurin and Novikov, “it might spread to the others”—the Leningraders. While he considered these matters of life and death, Stalin drove off to his dacha at Semyonovskoe, passing on the way a queue of bedraggled citizens waiting in the rain at a bus stop. Stalin stopped the car and ordered his bodyguards to offer the people a lift but they were afraid.
285
These dangers were perfectly demonstrated in 1991 when Boris Yeltsin used his Russian Presidency to demolish Gorbachev’s USSR. The moving of the capital back to Leningrad, city of Zinoviev and Kirov, had been a deadly issue in Russian politics ever since Peter the Great. Men died for it in the eighteenth century and they would die for it in 1949. Stalin was also suspicious of the popular heroism of Kuznetsov and the city of Leningrad itself during WWII. It represented an alternative totem of military patriotism to himself and Moscow.
286
Meanwhile just across the landing, in another apartment at Granovsky, a similar discussion in this tiny world was going on: Rada Khrushcheva, whose father was still in Kiev, was staying with her father’s friends the Malenkovs. She wanted to go to the wedding, but Malenkov, who knew how doomed Kuznetsov was, refused to give her the limousine to take her there. “I won’t give you the car—you’re not studying well.” But Rada went under her own steam.
287
“Dear Svetochka,” Stalin wrote to Svetlana in hospital on May 1950. “I got your letter. I’m glad you got off so lightly. Kidney trouble is a serious business. To say nothing of having a child. Where did you ever get the idea I’d abandoned you? It’s the sort of thing people dream up. I advise you not to believe your dreams. Take care of yourself. Take care of your daughter too. The State needs people even those born prematurely. Be patient a little longer—we’ll see each other soon. I kiss you my Svetochka. Your ‘little papa.’” He did not devote all his time to the Leningrad Case. During these days, he also supervised the creation of the new Soviet Encyclopaedia, deciding every detail from its quality of paper to its contents. When the editor asked if he should include “negative persons” such as Trotsky, he joked, “We’ll include Napoleon, but he was a big scoundrel!”