“Do you want to bring us to kneel before these criminals?” Malenkov retorted. “The Politburo has investigated this case three times. Carry out the Politburo’s resolution.” Malenkov admitted later that he had not told Stalin everything: “I did not dare!”
Stalin rejected official appeals. Lozovsky[299] and the Jewish poets were shot on 12 August 1952.5
Stalin refused to take a holiday that August: instead, unhappy at the dominance of Malenkov and Khrushchev, he decided to call a Congress in October, the first one since 1939, to anoint new, younger leaders and destroy his old comrades.
By September, Ignatiev, assisted by “Midget” Riumin, had tortured the evidence out of his prisoners to “prove” that the Kremlin doctors, led by Stalin’s own physician, had indeed murdered Zhdanov, Shcherbakov, Dmitrov and Choibalsang. A new crop were arrested but not yet Vinogradov. On the 18th, Stalin told Riumin to torture the doctors. Riumin, who possessed a macabre gift for primitive theatre, designed a special torture chamber at Lefortovo, furnished like a dissection room and operating theatre, to intimidate the doctors. Long before Laurence Olivier played the Nazi dentist in Marathon Man, Stalin was torturing his own doctors in a ghastly surgical parody.
“You’re acting like a whore! You’re an ignoble spy, a terrorist!” Riumin shouted at one of the doctors. “We’ll torture you with a red-hot iron. We have all the necessary equipment for that…” Stalin’s family was included in a bizarre medical melodrama, spawned by Stalin’s furious imagination and Riumin’s diabolical obedience: the doctors had deliberately subverted Vasily Stalin’s treatment for “nervous disorders” and had failed to prevent toxicosis in Svetlana Stalin after the birth of her child Katya Zhdanov in the spring of 1950. A surreal touch, if any was needed, was added by the case of Andreyev who had been ill since 1947: the doctors prescribed cocaine for his insomnia so it was hardly surprising he was unable to sleep. Andreyev[300] had become dependent on the drug, one of history’s more unlikely coke addicts.6
Absurd as the details may sound, the Doctors’ Plot had the beautiful enveloping symmetry of a panacea, one of Stalin’s fantastical masterpieces: working alone, only informing his grandees when he had results, and keeping complete control over all the parallel threads through the “Midget,” he weaved a tapestry that sewed together every intrigue and leading victim since the war, in order to mobilize the Soviet people against the external enemy, America, and its internal agents, the Jews, and therefore justify a new Terror. New research shows Stalin would toss into this cauldron various “murderous” Jews and doctors, Abakumov and his “unvigilant” Chekist “nincompoops,” and the executed Leningrader, Kuznetsov, who would be the link between the Jews, Zhdanov’s death, and the magnates—especially Mikoyan, via their children’s marriage. Just as in 1937 a man did not have to be a Trotskyite to be shot as one, so now the victims did not have to be Jewish to be accused of “Zionism”: Abakumov, no philo-Semite, was now smeared with Zionism. As for the sturdily Russian Molotov, Stalin had not nicknamed him “Molotstein,” in the twenties, for nothing.
Did Stalin really believe it all? Yes, passionately, because it was politically necessary, which was better than mere truth. “We ourselves will be able to determine,” Stalin told Ignatiev, “what is true and what is not.”
Stimulated by his labyrinth of secret investigations, Stalin did not give up his literary and scientific interests. As his brain atrophied, Stalin still “swotted like a good pupil,” as Beria put it, studying to dominate new fields and solve ideological problems. “I am seventy yet I go on learning just the same,” Stalin boasted to Svetlana. He read all the entries for the Stalin Prize and chaired the Committee to choose the winners in his office. That year, pacing as usual, he decreed that a novelist named Stepan Zlobin should win. Malenkov however pulled out a file and said, “Comrade Stalin, Zlobin conducted himself very badly when he was in a German concentration camp…”
Stalin walked round the table three times in dead silence then asked: “To forgive?” He continued pacing the table in silence. “Or not to forgive? To forgive or not to forgive?” Finally, he answered: “Forgive!” Zlobin won the prize. Stalin then attacked anti-Semitism: he had lately insisted that Jewish writers must have their Semitic names published in brackets after their Russian pseudonyms. Now he asked the surprised Committee: “What’s this for? Does it give pleasure to someone to underline that this man is Jewish? Why? To promote anti-Semitism?” As usual the old fox was playing several games in parallel.
He had always been interested in the study of linguistics: the field had been dominated by Professor Marr who had established Stalinist orthodoxy by arguing that language, like class, would ultimately disappear and merge into one language as Communism approached. A Georgian linguistics scholar, Arnold Chikobava, wrote to Stalin to attack the theory. Stalin, keen to buttress his national Bolshevism by overturning Marrism, summoned Chikobava to a dinner that lasted from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. taking notes diligently like a student. He then held an open debate in Pravda, finally intervening with his own article, “Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics” which immediately altered the entire field of Soviet science and ideology.[301]
Just before the Congress opened, Stalin proudly distributed the other fruit of his studies, his turgid masterpiece Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, which declared the “objectivity” of economic laws and reasserted the orthodoxy that the imperialist states would go to war, but it also leapt some of the stages of Marxism, to claim that Communism was achievable in his lifetime. Faith in ideology was always vital to Stalin but those old believers Molotov and Mikoyan did not agree with this “Leftist derivation.” When they came to dinner at Kuntsevo, Stalin asked: “Any questions? Any comments!” Beria and Malenkov, never ideologists, praised it. But even now, in danger of his life, Molotov would not agree with an ideological deviation. He just mumbled and Mikoyan said nothing.
Stalin noticed their silence and, later, smiled maliciously at Mikoyan: “Ah, you’ve lagged behind! Right now, the time has come!”
When they met to discuss the Presidium of the Congress, Stalin said, “No need to enter Mikoyan and Andreyev—they’re inactive Politburo members!” Since Mikoyan was immensely busy, the Politburo chuckled.
“I’m not joking,” snapped Stalin. “I suggest it seriously.” The laughter stopped instantly, but Mikoyan was included. Even at the height of his tyranny, Stalin had to feel his way in this close-knit oligarchy: Mikoyan and Molotov were prestigious Politburo titans, respected not only by their colleagues but by the public. Stalin proposed they expand the Politburo into a Presidium of twenty-five members. Mikoyan realized this would make it easier to remove the old Politburo members. “I thought—‘something’s happening.’” Mikoyan was suddenly afraid: “I was just knocked off my feet.” They realized Stalin had meant it when he shouted:
“You’ve grown old! I’ll replace you all!”7
At 7 p.m. (to suit Stalin’s own timetable) on 5 October 1952, the Nineteenth Congress opened. The leaders sat bunched together on the left with the ageing Stalin alone on the right. Stalin himself only attended the beginning and the end of the Congress but giving the major reports to Malenkov and Khrushchev placed them in pole position for the succession.[302] He only spoke at the end of the Congress for a few rambling minutes but a punch-drunk Stalin boasted to Khrushchev: “There, look at that! I can still do it!”
299
One of the survivors of Stalin’s time, Maxim Litvinov, the Jewish ex–Foreign Commissar, managed to die in his bed on 31 December 1951. He was a perennial target of the MGB’s anti-Semitic cases. Molotov admitted that Litvinov should have been shot for his rambunctious indiscretions in the late war years: “It was only by chance that he remained among the living,” said Molotov chillingly. There was a plan to arrange a road accident
300
Andreyev had appealed to Malenkov in January 1949 to “check the treatment… I don’t feel good despite following doctors’ orders. My head’s dizzy… I almost fall over. I’m disastrous. I feel the treatment and diagnosis is wrong…” He was probably right since the cocaine was clearly the wrong medicine. He signed off: “I’m devilishly unhappy to be out of work.”
301
Chikobava told Stalin that some of his Armenian colleagues had been sacked for sharing his views so Stalin immediately got the Armenian boss, Arutinov, on the telephone and asked about the professors. “They were removed from their posts,” replied Arutinov. “You were in too much of a hurry,” replied Stalin and hung up. The professors were woken up immediately and restored to their positions. His meeting with Chikobava probably took place on 12 April 1950 just as he was discussing the timing of the Korean War; Stalin’s article was published on 20 June that year. Chikobava’s original letter was sent to Stalin by Candide Charkviani, then Georgian First Secretary, which shows the power of those with direct access to the
302
Molotov opened the Congress, Kaganovich spoke on the Party rules, and Voroshilov closed it, representing the status quo, which few guessed that Stalin was planning to radically overturn. But there were clues. Significantly Stalin changed the Party’s name from Bolshevik to Communist Party. In the new Presidium, Beria slipped from his usual third place after Molotov, and Malenkov to fifth after Voroshilov. Beria’s acolytes Merkulov and Dekanozov were dropped from the new CC.