Yevgeniya’s second husband, Nikolai Molochnikov, a scientist and a Jew, was also arrested and condemned as a traitor (Article 19-58-1a), anti-Soviet propagandist (58-10, pt. 1), and member of an anti-Soviet organization (58-11) to twenty-five years’ imprisonment (Documents 3 and 4, Appendix II).216 According to Ariadna Balashova, a friend of Yevgeniya who was also arrested, Molochnikov was mercilessly beaten during interrogations.217 Later he was kept in Vladimir Prison as Number 21 (Document 3, Appendix II). During interrogations, Yevgeniya Allilueva realized that Molochnikov was an NKVD/MGB agent who had for years supplied information on the Alliluev family.218 After release from prison (the case was abolished on March 20, 1954), Yevgeniya divorced Molochnikov. However, both Anna and Yevgeniya returned from Vladimir with great faith in Stalin. In the meantime, all the events concerning the relatives of Stalin’s wives had occurred with his personal involvement, and the whole case was started on his personal order.219
On January 6, 1948, Yevgeniya’s daughter, Kira Allilueva, an actress at the Moscow Malyi Theater (her stage name was Politkovskaya), was also arrested. She was accused of “providing information about the family’s private life to persons working in the American embassy” and convicted to five years of exile in Ivanovo Region, not far from Moscow.220
On the top of all this, Iosif Moroz (or Moroz-Morozov), father of Grigory Moroz, Svetlana Stalina’s Jewish husband at the time, was also arrested, tried, and condemned as a traitor and member of an anti-Soviet organization (Articles 58-10, pt. 2, and 58-11) to fifteen years’ imprisonment (Document 5, Appendix II). Before that, after his son had married Svetlana Stalina, Iosif Moroz became a guest at the Barvikha Governmental Sanatorium.221 Although he did not have a scientific degree, he used to introduce himself as a professor and an Old Bolshevik. He became acquainted with Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, Academician Lina Stern (director of the Academy Institute of Physiology), and others. In 1945, Stern hired Moroz as her deputy director in charge of the Administrative and Household Equipment Section of the institute. These connections of Moroz with the highest Jewish elite in Soviet society were later used by the MGB for anti-Semite cases.
Moroz spent five years in Vladimir Prison. It is possible that he, like the other members of Stalin’s family, was kept under a number (it is not known which prisoners had Nos. 16–20 in Vladimir Prison at that time). In April 1953, Moroz was transferred to Moscow on the personal order of the first deputy head of the MVD, Bogdan Kobulov (Document 5, Appendix II) and, evidently, released soon after that. This order had apparently been given in connection with the secret Presidium (Politburo) decision dated April 3, 1953, to stop the Doctors’ Plot case and rehabilitate the arrested.222
It is interesting that December 4, 1951, is the last date of the transfer of all Stalin’s imprisoned relatives from one cell to another (Documents 1–5, Appendix II). Definitely, something occurred after that date. Yevgeniya Allilueva’s friend Ariadna Balashova recalled that Anna Allilueva was moved to Moscow before Stalin’s birthday on December 21. It was expected that she and other relatives would be pardoned by him. Nothing of the sort happened.
Lidiya Shatunovskaya, a graduate student of the State Institute of Theater Arts, and her husband, the well-known physicist Lev Tumerman, were among the friends of Yevgeniya Allilueva arrested in December 1947 (Documents 6 and 7, Appendix II). Shatunovskaya was an adopted daughter of Petr Krasikov, an Old Bolshevik, member of the Central Executive Committee, and deputy chairman of the Supreme Court. Her first husband was a high-ranking Soviet administrator. Later, Shatunovskaya described in detail how the Allilueva case quickly became purely anti-Semitic, especially after the murder of the actor and head of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) Solomon Mikhoels on January 13, 1948, by MGB agents. The JAC was a Jewish organization created in 1942 by Soviet authorities that coordinated the anti-Fascist activity of Soviet Jews and successfully disseminated in the United States information about the Nazi atrocities against the Jews on the territories occupied by the Nazis.223 On the personal order of Stalin, Abakumov organized the killing of Mikhoels and an MGB agent, Vladimir Golubov-Potapov, in Minsk, the capital of Belorussia. The operation was under personal supervision of first deputy MGB minister Sergei Ogol’tsov, Belorussian MGB minister Lavrentii Tsanava (one of the main henchmen of Lavrentii Beria, the main organizer of the Soviet state security system), and head of one of the departments within the Second (Counterintelligence) Department, Fyodor Shubnyakov.224
“We will exterminate all Jews in prisons and camps,” Vladimir Komarov, one of the most brutal MGB investigators, told Shatunovskaya during interrogations in 1948.225 Being “tall, stout, with round shoulders and a short neck,”226 Komarov “specialized” in beatings and torturing prisoners during interrogations. In the late 1940s–early 1950s, there were two special rooms for torture in Lubyanka Prison: Room No. 31 (known as the one used for “preliminary torture”) and Room No. 4, where Komarov “worked.”227 But the main tortures were in Lefortovo Prison. “My most terrifying memoirs are about the nights when I was forced to sit on a stool in an investigation cell next to Komarov’s office,” Shatunovskaya recalled. “All night long I heard blows by a [rubber] truncheon and shrieks, shrieks… From time to time Komarov rushed into the room, his eyes were red, grasped me from the stool, shook me and roared: “Do you hear? We will treat you the same way!”228
Komarov was absolutely cynical and extremely sadistic, but rather clever.229 However, this high-ranking MGB officer could hardly write. Later, during his own interrogation (Komarov was arrested in 1951 after the arrest of MGB minister Abakumov), Komarov testified:
Abakumov frequently told me that… I could not write at all. Honestly, I’d like to confess he was right, since writing testimonies of the arrested persons was a weak point [in our work] because all of us [i.e., MGB investigators] were semiliterate.230
Komarov reported the results of the “interrogations” of Shatunovskaya to Stalin directly, and Stalin gave instructions on how to torture the victim. Komarov yelled at Shatunovskaya: “This is Party and State politics!… We will destroy the so-called Jewish culture, and all of you, the Zionists, will be exterminated. All of you!” During the late 1940s–early 1950s, anti-Semitism was used by Soviet MGB interrogators not only in Moscow but also in the countries of Eastern Europe. In Prague, another notorious MGB investigator, Mikhail Likhachev (like Komarov, Likhachev was deputy head of the MGB Department for Investigation of Especially Important Cases [OVD]), who was in charge of organizing the infamous Slansky show trial, told one of the arrested high-ranking Communists, Eugen Loebl, during the interrogation in 1949: “You are not a Communist, and you are not a Czechoslovak. You are a dirty Jew, that’s what you are. Israel is your only real fatherland, and you have sold out Socialism to your bosses, the Zionist, imperialist leaders of world Jewry. Let me tell you: the time is approaching fast when we’ll have to exterminate all your kind.”231