Stalin and His Hangmen (74 page)

Among Bulgarian communists, as among the Poles, those who came to power with the Red Army and the MGB were at loggerheads with
wartime resistance communists. At the end of December 1948 Georgi Dimitrov, hero of the Reichstag fire trial and villain of Stalin’s Comintern, had Stalin’s sanction to dispose of two men who had spent the war in the Bulgarian resistance, one of them the deputy prime minister, Traicho Kostov. Dimitrov had gone back to Russia to die and Stalin trusted only a Moscow Bulgarian to take over. Lev Shvartsman led a team of MGB men to Sofia, where they tormented Kostov and a dozen others. Interrogation records in Bulgarian and Russian were sent for Stalin to peruse. Some victims were economists trained in the West, and Stalin’s hatred of ‘specialists’ imbues his comments: ‘The Kostov affair will help purging these agents and all hostile elements.’
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Abakumov proposed framing Kostov as an agent of Tito and Sergei Ogoltsov flew down with three regiments of MVD troops in civilian dress to draw up an indictment, which they did not even bother to translate into Bulgarian. Kostov was hanged in December 1949 and a thousand Bulgarians went to prison.

In Hungary Rákosi longed to be rid of his rival, Minister of Internal Affairs László Rajk, who had graduated from a Nazi concentration camp, not from the Comintern. It took years for Rákosi to persuade his Soviet masters, who doubted his sanity, to help but in May 1949 they arrested żivko Boarov, an attaché at the Yugoslav embassy in Budapest, and an American journalist Noel Field, who travelled between Budapest and Prague collecting material for his articles and had in 1943 refused to collaborate with the NKVD. Field and Boarov’s interrogators in Budapest forced them to implicate Rajk as an American and Yugoslav agent but used such terrible tortures that the confessions they extracted were too wild even for a Soviet-style trial. Rákosi, like Stalin, wanted Rajk charged with trying to assassinate him and asked Andrei Vyshinsky and Stalin for a Yugoslav prisoner as an additional witness.
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Soviet advisers reined back the Hungarian torturers and Rajk admitted being a fascist for twenty years and a Yugoslav agent for ten. Abakumov wrote the indictment for Rákosi; Rákosi and Stalin then hammered out a draft for TASS. On 22 September 1949 Stalin wrote to Rákosi: ‘I consider that L. Rajk must be executed since any other sentence won’t make sense to the people.’ Rajk and two others were hanged; over a hundred others imprisoned.

Rákosi’s fertile imagination concocted for Stalin a list of over 500
communists of all nationalities from Austrian to Australian but mostly Czechs and Slovaks to be repressed. Rákosi asked the Poles to try Gomułka. He asked the Czech leader Gottwald to arrest all Czech communists who had lived in the West. Polish and Czechoslovak secret policemen collected Rákosi’s dossiers from Budapest. The Poles merely dismissed Gomułka; the Czechoslovaks asked Moscow to send them the advisers who had worked so well in Bulgaria.

Klement Gottwald was no more anxious than Bierut to arrest his ministers but was more cowardly; the Soviet MGB men had to find a Czech equivalent to Rajk. Preliminary arrests under Abakumov’s instructions soon brought the necessary ‘evidence’. Gottwald was happily imprisoning and murdering social democrats, but extending the purge to ‘cosmopolitan’ communists created in Prague from 1949 to 1952 an atmosphere grimmer than anywhere else in eastern Europe. By February 1951, sixty Czech and Slovak communists were in prison. Gottwald knew that if he showed mercy or courage he too would fall victim to Rákosi and Stalin so laid down the lives of his friends to save his own. Rákosi and Enver Hoxha then began new purges; Rákosi’s own deputy János Kádár was jailed.

In Yugoslavia Tito neither hanged nor shot his Stalinists, but tens of thousands of pro-Soviet Yugoslav communists went to concentration camps to be broken physically and morally. The USSR did not intercede for these Yugoslavs; Stalin, Abakumov, Rukhadze, Riumin and Ignatiev were preoccupied with their own purges in Leningrad and Mingrelia. By the end of 1951, when they looked west again, Zionism was the main foe, and in any case Viktor Abakumov was in prison and Moscow had nobody with Abakumov’s competence. It was left to Rákosi to make the running. He was equal to the task and produced a list of Jews to be removed which included those who had helped him torture the ‘Titoists’. The Czechoslovaks too were told by Moscow to eliminate their Jews. Rudolf Slánský was the ideal scapegoat, a Jew who had appointed other Jews and who could be blamed for economic failures in Czechoslovakia. Klement Gottwald was awarding Slánský the Order of the Republic on his fiftieth birthday when Stalin sent the order to arrest him. A year later, Gottwald met Stalin at the nineteenth plenum of the Soviet Central Committee in October 1952 and within a month Slánský and ten others had been hanged in Prague.

Only the Romanians dawdled. Gheorghiu-Dej told the Soviet ambassador that he knew of no Romanians linked to Slánskyý. When pressed, the Romanian leader threw three of his Politbiuro, two Jews and one Hungarian, to the wolves. They were luckier than the Czechoslovaks: Stalin’s death let Gheorghiu-Dej off the hook. One victim died in prison, the other two were set free.

It is no wonder that Malenkov, Molotov and Beria let thirteen hours pass before they called for doctors, when on 2 March 1953 they were summoned to Stalin’s semi-conscious body, which had been lying on the floor in vest and pyjama bottoms for over twenty-four hours. They waited to be sure that the stroke was fatal and then Beria called to his driver, ‘Khrustaliov, the car!’ and raced off to the Kremlin.

Beria’s Hundred Days

‘All power,’ said a moron in his cups,

‘Tends inevitably to corrupt,

And absolute power corrupts absolutely.’

Clever men should think astutely,

And not repeat a thought so feeble,

Power in fact is corrupted by people.

Iuri Andropov

(KGB chairman 1967 – 82)
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There were broadly three reactions to the news of Stalin’s death. Many workers, peasants, children and students were hysterical with grief; they felt bereft of certainties and abandoned to the mercy of enemies and intriguers, domestic and foreign. GULAG prisoners smiled, laughed, tossed their caps into the air; this was their first ray of hope, the first time they had seen their guards discomfited. The party apparatchiks and hangmen calculated how power would be inherited and began a waiting game, while the leadership maintained, for the time being, the semblance of unity essential for their immediate survival.

Stalin’s achievement may be measured by the ease with which the
state survived his demise. Four days after his death Beria, Malenkov, Bulganin and Khrushchiov amicably reallocated power. The leaders from eastern Europe who came for Stalin’s funeral were reassured. Malenkov was ‘prime minister’ on the Council of Ministers; Molotov took over foreign affairs, Beria internal affairs and Bulganin was defence minister, with the former minister Marshal Vasilevsky staying on as his deputy. Khrushchiov ran the Central Committee of the party, which now became the servant not the master of the government. Mikoyan and Kaganovich had posts that preserved their self-esteem; Voroshilov basked in the empty title of head of state.

But Beria was taking the helm with formidable speed and fearlessness. Like the east European communists, he understood the Ministries of the Interior and of State Security to be the focus of power. He made the Ministry of State Security what it had been before 1941, a department of the Interior Ministry. Sergei Ignatiev quietly stepped aside. Beria first needed to win from his colleagues, the party and the Red Army what they most begrudged him: trust and popularity. Immediately after Stalin’s funeral, he had Polina Zhemchuzhina flown back to Moscow to be remarried to Molotov. He rehabilitated Kaganovich’s brother Mikhail, and awarded his widow a pension. However, neither Molotov nor Kaganovich showed any gratitude.
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Less than a week after Stalin’s funeral, Beria set up four commissions to report to Kruglov, Kobulov and Goglidze within two weeks. One commission acquitted the surviving Kremlin doctors, the second rehabilitated state security officers whom Riumin had brought down, the third liberated artillery officers purged by Stalin, the fourth freed the Mingrelians imprisoned or exiled by Rukhadze. Beria himself then rehabilitated Solomon Mikhoels. He was extraordinarily unvindictive: of Mikhoels’s murderers, only Ogoltsov and Tsanava suffered; Riumin was traced to his shack outside the Sevastopol post office, arrested, interviewed by Beria for fifty-five minutes and promised his life if he confessed everything, then handed over to Vlodzimirsky and Khvat. On 24 March he wrote to Beria, ‘When I have to die, regardless of why or in what circumstances, my last words will be: I am devoted to the party and its Central Committee! At the moment I believe in the wisdom of L. P. Beria… and hope my case will have a just outcome.’ In a second interview with Beria Riumin was told, ‘You and I shan’t see each other
again. We are liquidating you.’ Riumin fell ill with despair, but then Beria forgot about him.

Others who had actually worked against Beria or whom he had undermined – General Vlasik, Rukhadze who had engineered the Mingrelian arrests, Abakumov and a handful of Abakumov’s most brutal interrogators – remained in prison, but they were left in peace. Beria interviewed Rukhadze in his office in March 1953, and Rukhadze grovelled to Beria from the Lubianka:

I weep, I am in agony, I repent everything that has happened. I feel very, very sad. Please believe me, Lavrenti, that I had no hostile intent. The circumstances I was in, and my loneliness, had a big part in my sins… I turn to you with a plea, as to my own father and tutor, and on my knees with tears in my eyes ask you to spare, forgive and reprieve me. For my children’s sake let me have the chance of dying in freedom, after seeing them for the last time. You and only you, Lavrenti, can save me.
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At first Beria had support from his closest ally Malenkov, who in April drafted a speech deploring, without naming Stalin, the ‘personality cult’ of Stalin’s last years. The party meeting was postponed and the speech never made.
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The biggest shock came on 26 March, when Beria sent a note to Malenkov proposing the world’s biggest amnesty: it would empty the GULAG of a million prisoners. Half, Beria pointed out, were there because of Stalin’s 1947 law prescribing long prison sentences for all kinds of theft. Everyone with sentences of under five years was to be freed and their slate wiped clean. Sentences over five years would be halved. All women who had children under ten or who were pregnant were to be freed, as were males over fifty or under eighteen. The Ministry of Justice had one month to come up with alternatives to prison for most crimes.

The motive was purely practical. As Beria pointed out, the judicial system was flooding the GULAG with 650,000 new prisoners every year. Political prisoners – some half a million, except for a very few with short sentences – would still serve their time.
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Two months later Beria abolished the special sessions, the troikas of MVD, prosecutor and party secretary that since 1934 had sentenced millions to deportation, imprisonment or death. Beria washed his hands of the whole penal system
and handed it to the Ministry of Justice except for the special prisons and camps that still held 220,000 of the political prisoners and war criminals.
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Beria had, in theory, established the rule of law in the USSR but the irony is that he let the measures be called the Voroshilov Amnesty. Over 1,200,000 prisoners were in fact freed and nearly half a million prosecutions were aborted. By summer 1953 Russian cities were being plagued by amnestied thieves, muggers and rapists, while political prisoners and their families went on suffering.

On 3 April 1953, thirty-seven doctors were publicly rehabilitated; Ignatiev was disgraced and Lidia Timashuk lost her medal. Beria sent a secret memorandum to the Presidium with statements from Abakumov, Ogoltsov and Tsanava admitting the murders of Mikhoels and his friend Golubov on Stalin’s orders. Lest the typist be shocked by the
lèse-majesté
, Beria inserted Stalin’s name by hand. Again, the killers had their medals taken away. On 4 April 1953, Beria prohibited torture. The chambers in Lefortovo prison were dismantled and all instruments destroyed; the poisons laboratory, however, remained. Four days later the Presidium received a long document from Beria expressing concern for his native Georgia. In consequence, the Mingrelians purged by Rukhadze and Stalin were rehabilitated, as were 11,000 unfortunate Georgian citizens who had been deprived of all their possessions and deported. This document too had Stalin’s name inserted by hand wherever the chain of responsibility led to the top. There were no revenge arrests; Akaki Mgeladze, whom Stalin had put in charge of the Georgian party, went to manage a tree nursery in north-eastern Georgia. Beria made a rehabilitated Mingrelian, Aleksi Mirtskhulava, the Georgian party leader.