Khrushchev was ill during the Congress: when an old doctor visited him on Granovsky and treated him kindly, “I was tormented because I already had the testimony against the doctor. I knew no matter what I said, Stalin would not spare him.” But the real action was on 16 October at the Plenum to elect the Presidium and Secretariat. No one was ready for Stalin’s ambush.
57. BLIND KITTENS AND HIPPOPOTAMUSES
The Destruction of the Old Guard
Stalin loped down to the rostrum two metres in front of the pew-like seats where the magnates sat. The Plenum watched in frozen fascination as the old man began to speak “fiercely,” peering into the eyes of the small audience “attentively and tenaciously as if trying to guess their thoughts.”
“So we held the Party Congress,” he said. “It was fine and it would seem to most people that we enjoy unity. However, we don’t have unity. Some people express disagreement with our decisions. Why did we exclude Ministers from important posts… Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov?… Ministers’ work… demands great strength, knowledge and health.” So he was bringing forward “young men, full of strength and energy.” But then he unleashed his thunderbolt: “If we’re talking unity, I cannot but touch on the incorrect behaviour of some honoured politicians. I mean Comrades Molotov and Mikoyan.”
Sitting just behind Stalin, their faces turned “pale and dead” in the “terrible silence.” The magnates, “stony, strained and grave,” wondered “where and when would Stalin stop, would he touch the others after Molotov and Mikoyan?”
First he dealt with Molotov: “Molotov’s loyal to our cause. Ask him and I don’t doubt he’d give his life for our Party without hesitation. But we cannot overlook unworthy acts.” Stalin dredged up Molotov’s mistake with censorship: “Comrade Molotov, our Foreign Minister, drunk on chartreuse at a diplomatic reception, let the British Ambassador publish bourgeois newspapers in our country… This is the first political mistake. And what’s the value of Comrade Molotov’s proposal to give the Crimea to the Jews? That’s a huge mistake… the second political mistake of Comrade Molotov.” The third was Polina: “Comrade Molotov respects his wife so much that as soon as we adopt a Politburo decision… it instantly becomes known to Comrade Zhemchuzhina… A hidden thread connects the Politburo with Molotov’s wife—and her friends… who are untrustworthy. Such behaviour isn’t acceptable in a Politburo member.” Then he attacked Mikoyan for opposing higher taxes on the peasantry: “Who does he think he is, our Anastas Mikoyan? What’s unclear to him?”
Then he pulled a piece of paper out of his tunic, and read out the thirty-six members of the new Presidium, including many new names. Khrushchev and Malenkov glanced at each other: where had Stalin found these people? When he proposed the inner Bureau, everyone was astonished that Molotov and Mikoyan were excluded.[303] Then, returning to his seat on the tribune, he explained their downfalclass="underline" “They’re scared by the overwhelming power they saw in America.” He ominously linked Molotov and Mikoyan to the Rightists, Rykov and Frumkin, shot long before, and Lozovsky, just shot in August.
Molotov stood and confessed: “I am and remain a loyal disciple of Stalin,” but the Generalissimo cupped his ear and barked:
“Nonsense! I’ve no disciples! We’re all disciples of Lenin. Of Lenin!”
Mikoyan fought back defiantly: “You must remember well, Comrade Stalin… I proved I wasn’t guilty of anything.” Malenkov and Beria heckled him, hissing “liar,” but he persisted. “And as for the bread prices, I completely deny the accusation”—but Stalin interrupted him: “See, there goes Mikoyan! He’s our new Frumkin!”
Then a voice called out: “We must elect Comrade Stalin General Secretary!”
“No,” replied Stalin. “Excuse me from the posts of General Secretary and Chairman of the Council of Ministers [Premier].” Malenkov stood up and ran forward, chins aquiver, with the desperate grace of a whippet sealed inside a blancmange. His “terrible expression” was not fear, observed Simonov, but an “understanding much better than anyone else of the mortal danger that hung over alclass="underline" it was impossible to comply with Stalin’s request.”
Malenkov, tottering on the edge of the stage, raised his hands as if he was praying and piped up: “Comrades! We must all unanimously demand that Comrade Stalin, our leader and teacher, remain as General Secretary!” He shook his finger, signalling. The whole hall understood and began to cry out that Stalin had to remain at his post. Malenkov’s jowls relaxed as if he had “escaped direct, real mortal danger.” But he was not safe yet.
“One doesn’t need the applause of the Plenum,” replied Stalin. “I ask you to release me… I’m already old. I don’t read the documents. Elect yourselves another Secretary.”
Marshal Timoshenko replied: “Comrade Stalin, the people won’t understand it. We all as one elect you our leader—General Secretary!” The cheering went on for a long time. Stalin waited, then, waving modestly, he sat down.
Stalin’s decision to destroy his oldest comrades was not an act of madness but the rational destruction of his most likely successors. As Stalin remembered well, the ailing Lenin had attacked his likely successor (Stalin himself) and proposed an expanded Central Committee with none of the leaders as members. It was now that the magnates realized “they were all in the same boat” because, Beria told his son, “none of them would be Stalin’s successor: he intended to choose an heir from the younger generation.” There was probably no secret heir: only a “collective” could succeed Stalin.[304]
Stalin was satisfied by Molotov’s ritual submission but asked him to return the secret protocols of the Ribbentrop Pact, clearly to form part of the case against him.
As for Mikoyan, Stalin was shocked at his defiance. At Kuntsevo, in the absence of his two bugbears, Stalin grumbled to Malenkov and Beria: “Look, Mikoyan even argued back!” In the days after the Plenum, Molotov and Mikoyan continued to play their usual roles in the government but Stalin was now supervising the climax of his Doctors’ Plot, burning with fury against Professor Vinogradov for recommending his retirement. Yet it was typical of this stealthy old conspirator that he had suppressed his anger and waited eleven months to gather the evidence to destroy his own physician.
Now it all came bursting out. Ordering Ignatiev to arrest Vinogradov, he shouted: “Leg irons! Put him in irons!”1
On 4 November, Vinogradov was arrested, touching every Politburo family because, as Sergo Beria wrote, he was “our family doctor.”
Three days later, Svetlana, now entangled in another dangerous relationship, this time with Johnreed Svanidze, the son of those executed “spies” Alyosha and Maria, brought over her two children to play with their grandfather. It was the Revolution holiday, the twentieth anniversary of Nadya’s suicide. At the height of the Jewish Terror, Stalin really “hit it off” with his half-Jewish grandson, Joseph Morozov, now seven, with his “huge shiny Jewish eyes and long lashes.”
“What thoughtful eyes,” said Stalin, pouring the children thimbles of wine “in the fashion of the Caucasus.” “He’s a smart boy.” Svetlana was touched. He had recently met Yakov’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Gulia Djugashvili, whom he delighted by letting her serve the tea.
“Let the khozyaika do it!” he said, tousling her hair, kissing her. Gulia, better than anyone, catches his febrile excitement at the great enterprise of a new struggle: “His face was very tired but he could hardly stay still.”
303
Yet Stalin still remembered his loyalest retainer Mekhlis, who had suffered a stroke in 1949. Now dying at his dacha, all he longed for was to attend the Congress. Stalin refused, muttering that it was not a hospital but when the new CC was announced, he remembered him. Mekhlis was thrilled—he died happy and Stalin authorized a magnificent funeral.
304
One of these heirs would probably have been Mikhail Suslov, fifty-one, Party Secretary, who combined the necessary ideological kudos (Zhdanov’s successor as CC Ideology and International Relations chief) with the brutal commitment: he had purged Rostov in 1938, supervised the deportation of the Karachai during the war, suppressed the Baltics afterwards and presided over the anti-Semitic campaign. In 1948, he frequently met Stalin. Furthermore, he was personally ascetic. Beria loathed this “Party rat,” bespectacled, tall and thin as a “tapeworm” with the voice of a “grating castrate.” Roy Medvedev makes the educated guess that Suslov was “Stalin’s secret heir” in his new