Stalin and His Hangmen (70 page)

2. To deem it essential that Malenkov be removed from the Secretariat of the Central Committee.
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In March Malenkov, hitherto at only forty-five the rival of Andrei Zhdanov as Stalin’s heir apparent, was packed off to Kazakhstan.
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Beria alone seemed safe. In 1946 he left his ministry in order to manage the atomic weapons project, but from the Politbiuro he still oversaw internal affairs. The minister, Sergei Kruglov, was an unimaginative, spasmodically brutal bureaucrat. His main tasks for Stalin were to develop the GULAG and build more canals with slave labour. On Stalin’s insistence he put 200,000 political prisoners into special camps to be worked to death in harsher conditions, their only consolation being that they were moved away from the common criminals who had raped, robbed and murdered them.

Beria lost his subservient, urbane minister for state security, Vsevolod Merkulov; Stalin wanted a more forceful minister. Viktor Abakumov came from SMERSH and reported direct to Stalin. Beria and Abakumov had no time for each other. Abakumov brought with him to the Ministry
of State Security (MGB) two SMERSH generals, although Beria’s position in the Politbiuro left him with a little leverage over Abakumov, who retained several of Beria’s henchmen. One was Sergei Ogoltsov, who had cannily declined to be minister on the grounds of ‘lack of knowledge and experience’ – disingenuous considering that he had joined the Cheka at the age of eighteen, had terrorized the Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and in winter 1941–2, under siege in Leningrad, had shot thirty-two prominent academics as ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Abakumov, like Beria, stood by his staff however much he abused them verbally; he even kept on the NKVD’s token Latvian, Eglitis, as well as two Georgian satraps of Beria’s, Goglidze in the Far East and Tsanava in Belorussia. In Georgia, however, he got rid of Beria’s nominee Rapava.

Beria took the atomic bomb project over from Molotov, who had failed to organize even a supply of uranium. Until Hiroshima, Stalin had paid little attention to his physicists’ warnings of the Allies’ and Germans’ progress. Now Stalin gave Beria first call on all resources as long as he got a bomb. If Beria failed, he would undoubtedly be shot.

In the event, Beria’s four years managing atomic weaponry were impressive. He seemed to get as much enjoyment from engineering projects as from arresting and killing enemies of the state. The atmosphere in which Soviet physicists and engineers worked was electric, and rather more luxurious than Los Alamos. This was Stalin’s one project where almost nobody was arrested and where all deadlines were met.
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There were many unnamed victims: thousands died mining uranium. More prisoners built laboratories, villas, garages, railway lines, even whole cities. Tens of thousands – three generations – of Kazakhs were condemned to death and radiation sickness when the bomb was tested in 1949. For once, however, the scientific community in the USSR felt valued.

The Soviet atomic bomb was built from information provided by Western scientists – some because they were communists, some believing that world peace would be secured by both sides in the cold war possessing nuclear deterrents, a few for mercenary reasons. Beria and NKVD men like Sudoplatov took the credit; Soviet foreign intelligence had revived in the ten years since Ezhov had annihilated it. The NKVD learnt nuclear physics from Klaus Fuchs, metallurgy from Melita Norwood. Germany was scoured for scientists, students of Werner Heisenberg, who could enrich uranium and produce heavy water, and for the engineers
who had built the V-2 rockets that would develop into intercontinental ballistic missiles. Physicists were retrieved from the GULAG and POW camps to be well fed and housed on the Black Sea.

First Beria located his uranium. In June 1946 Ivan Serov and another close associate General Mikhail Maltsev founded a company called Bismuth staffed by MGB troops. It took over twenty-seven sites in Upper Saxony and by October they were mining uranium from the old silver and lead mines. More uranium came from the Urals and the Russian Arctic.

Next Beria assembled his personnel. General Boris Vannikov, who had been tortured and then released in the first months of the war, maintained discipline; he clumsily bullied the physicists with a loaded revolver on his desk. Pavel Meshik, an old hand of Beria’s, came fresh from SMERSH and the subjugation of Poland. He ensured hermetic secrecy around a project employing 100,000 persons. Beria kept constant watch, travelling the length and breadth of the USSR in a specially adapted train to dozens of sites in Siberia, the Urals, the Caucasus and Kazakhstan. Physicists were rewarded with a freedom to publish rivalled only by the Orthodox Church.
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The physicist who adapted Western information to Soviet resources was Igor Kurchatov. Piotr Kapitsa, used to working for the tactful Lord Rutherford, would not be bossed by Beria. In November 1945 he complained to Stalin: ‘Comrade Beria’s weakness is that a conductor has not only to wave his baton around, he has to understand the score. That’s where he’s no good… marking proposed resolutions with a pencil in his chairman’s armchair does not amount to managing a problem.’ Kapitsa urged Stalin to let the physicists run the project themselves: ‘scientists are the leading force, not the subordinates in this business’. After Beria visited him in person Kapitsa withdrew from the project, and when Beria demanded his arrest, Stalin replied, ‘You’re not to touch him.’ Kapitsa spent seven years working in his own laboratory at his dacha.

In summer 1949 Igor Kurchatov took a nickel hemisphere with a critical mass of plutonium to the Kremlin. Stalin stroked it and felt the heat. The Soviet bomb was tested in Kazakhstan at 7 a.m. on 29 August 1949, eleven years earlier than American experts had predicted. Beria’s euphoria was spoilt only by Stalin, who, woken at 4 a.m. in Moscow, responded ‘I already know’ to the news. Kurchatov and Beria distributed
dachas, cars and fat bonuses to all those involved. According to Kurchatov, Beria had a notebook which listed each person’s punishment – from shooting to the camps – if the bomb failed: the rewards were calculated accordingly.

Crushing the Last of the Literati

The literati were unluckier than the physicists. Andrei Zhdanov was told to bring them to book. Zhdanov began with Leningrad, working closely under Stalin’s supervision. The propaganda apparatus of the Central Committee undertook literary criticism. They found war stories objectionable if the soldier heroes were downcast, poems deplorable if they lamented ruined cities. Humour was utterly beyond Zhdanov. Targeting the Leningrad journal
Zvezda
, he picked on one of the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko’s funniest stories,
The Adventures of an Ape
, and raged at the idea of an ape escaped from the zoo becoming an example for human beings.

On 9 August 1946 Stalin himself, with Zhdanov and a rehabilitated, chastened Malenkov, railed at
Zvezda
’s unfortunate editor Vissarion Saianov for printing a parody of the nineteenth-century civic poet Nekrasov.
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A parody, said Stalin, was ‘a trick, the author is hiding behind someone’. Stories like Zoshchenko’s, said Stalin – even though he had read him to his daughter Svetlana – proved that the editors were ‘tiptoeing after foreign writers… encouraging servile feelings’. Others, notably the playwright Vsevolod Vishnevsky, joined the attack: Zoshchenko’s autobiographical tale
Before Sunrise
, Vishnevsky told Stalin, was ‘undressing down to his dirty underwear’, Zoshchenko’s heroes were ‘drunks, cripples, invalids’. Stalin damned Zoshchenko as ‘the preacher of non-ideology’, his stories as ‘malevolent rant’. Anna Akhmatova was called by Stalin ‘nothing but an old name’. One editor stood up for Akhmatova, saying that if rejected by
Zvezda
she would be printed in
Znamia
, to which Stalin retorted, ‘We’ll get round to
Znamia
too, we’ll get round to the lot of them.’ Finally, Stalin conceded that there were ‘diamonds mixed with the dung’ but the Akhmatova and Zoshchenko cult was blamed on Leningrad’s unsound ideology. The journals were
put under new editorship; Akhmatova, one of Russia’s two greatest living poets, and Zoshchenko, its best short-story writer, were outlawed. The next day the MGB denounced Zoshchenko’s ‘anti-Soviet’ views, his doubts about victory, his remark that ‘Soviet literature is now a pathetic spectacle’ and his bad influence. Zoshchenko was not however arrested; possibly he was saved by writing an emotional but dignified defence to Stalin.

Also on 9 August Stalin made a speech to the party’s Orgbiuro on the films he had seen. Scenes that showed homeless coal miners after the war should be thrown out of films. He compared Russian scriptwriters unfavourably to Charlie Chaplin.
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Soviet poets were lazy compared to Goethe who had worked for thirty years at
Faust
(
Faust
was always a literary benchmark for Stalin). He disliked the second part of Eisenstein’s
Ivan the Terrible
with its remorseful Tsar and its carousing secret police whom Eisenstein had depicted as ‘the lowest mangy rabble, as degenerates, something like the American Ku Klux Klan’.

Stalin’s rant signalled a crackdown: the ninety-volume edition of Tolstoy which had been coming out since 1928 was shortened, Tolstoi’s Christianity neutralized by Leninist prefaces. The novelist Fadeev, complicit in the execution of so many writers in 1937–8, was made general secretary of the Union of Writers. Access to foreign literature was strictly limited to those whom Stalin felt had a need to see corrupting matter.

Literature was crushed but Stalin was gentler with the cinema, the Politbiuro’s main source of relaxation. On 23 February 1947, late at night, Eisenstein and Nikolai Cherkasov, who had played Ivan the Terrible, were brought to see Stalin, Molotov and Zhdanov in the Kremlin.
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Everything that Stalin said was self-revelation. He lectured Eisenstein on history, and then criticized his Ivan: ‘you made him too indecisive, like Hamlet’. Ivan, said Stalin, had been the first ruler to nationalize all foreign trade. It was right to show Ivan as cruel, Stalin told Eisenstein and Cherkasov, but wrong not to show why he had to be cruel. His only mistakes were ‘not cutting the throats of the last five feudal families’ and ‘letting God get in the way and spending a long time repenting and praying’. ‘Of course,’ said Stalin, ‘we’re not very good Christians, but we can’t deny the progressive role of Christianity.’ Stalin showed a grasp of cinematography; Zhdanov and Molotov could only add puerile remarks. By midnight the atmosphere was amicable. Cinema
and music were the only two art forms where Stalin forgave an artist’s mistakes.

By autumn 1946, like naughty schoolboys, Malenkov, Mikoyan, Molotov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov had been punished and reinstated. Under Beria’s supervision, they could be left to run the country while Stalin took another break of over three months in Sochi. The Politbiuro were not popular; the population had to endure frozen wages, raised prices, lower food rations, higher collective farm quotas and rampant crime. Some things, however, were going well. The Nuremberg trials had run smoothly; the German defendants had not alluded to Stalin’s war crimes. No British or American politician or lawyer had remarked in public that half of the Soviet commission for trying Hitler’s war criminals belonged in the dock with them. Stalin had not let victory go to his generals’ heads. Marshal Zhukov, the conqueror of Berlin, ran Germany as his fiefdom only until March. Stalin had Abakumov and Beria collect evidence against Zhukov who, like most senior officers in the Red Army and the NKVD, had furnished his dacha and house with German loot, and even considered casting him as a British spy. Like Tukhachevsky eight years earlier, Zhukov was given an intimation of his mortality by demotion to a provincial command; unlike Tukhachevsky, Zhukov was not pushed over the precipice.

Despite fearful anticipation, 1947 did not bring a return to terror; it was the most stable year of Stalin’s regime. There were no sudden falls from grace or tergiversations of policy. Andrei Zhdanov was on his way out, drinking himself to death, and the promotion of other juniors whom Stalin consulted more and more, such as Nikolai Voznesensky from the State Planning Ministry and the charismatic Leningrad party boss Aleksei Kuznetsov, did not yet alarm the established satraps.
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Stalin reinstated pre-war foreign policy by forbidding American capital in the form of the Marshall Plan to ‘enslave’, as Vyshinsky was told to put it, the economies of eastern Europe.

In 1947, those who cooperated with Russia’s wartime allies suffered. Two cancer specialists in Leningrad, Professors Nina Kliueva and Grigori Roskin, had been offered equipment by the American ambassador in exchange for sharing their research into crucin, an anti-tumour drug. Zhdanov called this a betrayal of state secrets and revived in a nastier
form the pre-revolution ‘court of honour’ to deal with professional misconduct, after which the wretched professors were handed to Abakumov’s MGB. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and MGB were also busy hunting down Ukrainian partisans; they killed some 3,000 and sent 13,000 to the GULAG. Hundreds of Abakumov’s most experienced officers were now ‘advisers’ to the new security services of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania, where they sometimes had to hold back, not egg on, the local recruits. Yugoslavia needed no advice; Tito had a secret police as ruthless as Stalin’s.