Both Shatunovskaya and her husband were later put in Vladimir Prison (Documents 6 and 7, Appendix II). They were released after Stalin’s death, but Tumerman had scars for the rest of his life from the terrible torture he received during Komarov’s interrogations. From her ordeal as a prisoner, Shatunovskaya had a damaged spinal column and arm and leg joints, as well as a weak heart and bad sight. During his imprisonment, another physicist published the results of Tumerman’s scientific studies under his own name. After his release, Tumerman worked at the Institute of Molecular Biology until he and his family emigrated to Israel.232
Rebecca Levina (1899–1964), an aged economist and corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, was also arrested in 1948 in connection with the Allilueva case.233 Before that, in December 1947, her coworker, also an economist (and senior scientist) Isaak Goldstein (1892–1953) had been arrested together with his wife (without a prosecutor’s sanction). Unfortunately for him, in the 1920s he had worked with Yevgeniya Allilueva at the Soviet Commercial Office in Berlin. Now he became a key person in the Allilueva case and fell into the hands of Abakumov and his professional torturers.
During the first interrogations, Levina insisted that she was innocent. The investigators, Colonels Georgii Sorokin and Mikhail Likhachev, used sleep deprivation and lengthy “standing” interrogations that usually ended when Levina fainted, fell down, and was then cruelly beaten. The investigators broke the old lady’s front teeth. They struck her body with a rubber baton on the buttocks, legs, back, and genitals. After this, Levina finally “confessed.”
On May 29, 1948, all of the eleven or twelve members of the Allilueva case were sentenced by a special MGB council (the OSO) to ten to twenty-five years’ imprisonment. Two friends of Yevgeniya Allilueva, a married couple named Zaitsev, were convicted as “American spies” to twenty-five years’ imprisonment.234 Before his arrest, Vitalii Zaitsev, a lawyer and employee of the Foreign Ministry, worked at the American Embassy in Moscow. This was enough to consider him a spy. Maryana Zaitseva’s mother, Tatyana Fradkina, received “only” ten years.235 All three of them were put in Vladimir Prison, where they were kept in solitary confinement. Fradkina died on January 7, 1951. Levina got ten years in Vladimir (Document 8, Appendix II). Goldstein was tried by the OSO separately, on October 29, 1949, and condemned to twenty-five years’ imprisonment as a spy; as with the others, he was put in Vladimir Prison (Document 9, Appendix II). He died there on October 30, 1953, after Stalin’s death, while waiting for a reevaluation of his case.
As for Svetlana Stalina’s Jewish husband Grigory Moroz, Stalin simply told Svetlana: “You cannot be Morozov’s wife any more. Today he must leave [our apartment in] the Kremlin… I know you love him and do not want him to be chained to a prison wheelbarrow [in a mine].”236 Soon, on Stalin’s order, Svetlana married Yurii Zhdanov without divorcing Moroz. Yurii was a son of one of the main Party leaders of the time, Andrei Zhdanov. As I will describe in Chapter 4, in 1948 Yurii Zhdanov played an important role in the Lysenko affair.
In 1953, Levina was transferred from Vladimir Prison to a mental prison hospital in Kazan widely known for its especially harsh regime (later, in the 1960s–1970s, many dissidents were put into this “hospital”). In 1939, NKVD commissar Beria ordered the transfer of Kazan Psychiatric Hospital under NKVD control. On July 13, 1945, NKVD deputy commissar Vasilii Chernyshov issued special regulations for the NKVD doctors and prisoners of the NKVD Kazan Psychiatric Prison Hospital (KTPH). In the 1940s–1950s, convicts were sent to the KTPH for enforced treatment following the decision of a court (criminal cases) or the OSO (political cases).237 After “treatment” at Kazan Hospital, Levina was released, by that time completely insane.
While Levina was in jail, her husband, professor of pathologic physiology Lev Levin, was persecuted as a Jew. Her son Mikhail (1921–1992), who later became a well-known radio physicist, was arrested even earlier, in 1944.238 He was a close friend of Academician Sakharov from their university years, and Sakharov mentioned Mikhail Levin in his memoirs with warm feeling: “Only one physicist in all of the USSR came to see me (and twice) in [exile in] Gorky without official permission—my former university classmate, Misha Levin.”239 In 1944, Levin, together with a group of friends, was charged with an attempt on Stalin’s life. All of them lived in the center of Moscow in apartment buildings on Arbat Street, right on the auto route Stalin and his guards used to go back and forth from Stalin’s dacha in the Moscow suburbs (where Stalin lived) to the Kremlin. During interrogations, Mikhail Levin managed to persuade the NKGB investigators that the accusation was complete nonsense. The attempt was physically impossible: The windows of all the rooms where the accused lived faced closed yards and not Arbat Street, and, therefore, it was not possible to shoot from the windows at passing cars. Naturally, the arrested were not released but sentenced to imprisonment in labor camps. Mikhail Levin spent a year in an institute for imprisoned scientists, the so-called sharashka. Although he was released from prison in 1945, Levin was forced to live in Gorky, the future location of Academician Sakharov’s exile in the 1980s. Only in 1956 was Levin allowed to return to Moscow, where he started to work at the Academy Radiotechnical Institute.
I was lucky to have been acquainted with Dr. Levin. In the summer of 1980, we rented houses not far from each other at a resort town called Narva in Estonia, where we spent a month with our children. Dr. Levin’s encyclopedic knowledge of European and Russian history was amazing. Also, he was a poet.
In 1949, the famous physiologist and academician Lina Stern was arrested in connection with the anti-Semitic “Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee case.”240 In 1925, Stern moved from Switzerland, where she was a professor at Geneva University, to the USSR.241 From 1925 until her arrest, she was a professor at the Second Moscow Medical Institute and director (from 1929) of the Institute of Physiology. She was the only woman to be a member of both Soviet academies, the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Medical Sciences. The actor Mikhoels chaired the JAC, and Dr. Stern was a member of this committee.
The JAC case was initiated by reports of MGB minister Abakumov to the Central Committee and Council of Ministers in January and March 1948 about the “testimonies” of Isaak Goldstein and another arrested Jewish prisoner, Zakhar Grinberg, who was a senior scientist at the Academy Institute of World Literature. Dr. Grinberg, a friend of Goldstein, was the closest aide of Solomon Mikhoels in the JAC on matters concerning the Jewish scientific intelligentsia.242 In his reports, Abakumov claimed that the “testimonies” of Goldstein and Grinberg showed that the JAC was involved in the movement toward Jewish nationalism. These false “testimonies” were signed by Goldstein after torture.243 Later, on October 2, 1953, Goldstein wrote from Vladimir Prison: “In total, I was beaten eight times… Exhausted by these day-and-night interrogations, terrorized by tortures, swearing, and threats, I fell into a deep despair and total moral miasma, and started to incriminate myself and others in very serious crimes.”244