Stalin and His Hangmen (76 page)

Georgian leaders were bitter: rehabilitated Mingrelians, they complained, were now demanding ministerial posts. Beria’s crony in Azerbaijan Bagirov was so spiteful – he was to share Beria’s fate – that for once the audience turned on a speaker. Molotov and Kaganovich came better prepared. They portrayed Beria as a man who had misled and corrupted Stalin, frustrated economic planning and put the state at risk to please capitalists; he had probably been a fascist plant since 1920. Others thought up new accusations: Beria had engineered the fatal quarrel between Stalin and Orjonikidze and the estrangement between Stalin and Molotov. Beria, said Andrei Andreevich Andreev who had left his sickbed for the meeting, was a second Tito – this perhaps the most perceptive of all accusations. Beria, complained others, visited them in their nightmares.

Malenkov in his summing-up tacitly conceded that Beria was right – there had been a personality cult of an elderly dictator who had lost his
grip, the doctors and the Jewish anti-fascists had been unjustly arrested, East Germany’s ‘building of socialism’ had been misconceived. But Beria, Malenkov insisted, was right for the wrong reasons.

On 15 July Beria lost all his medals, awards and titles. The intensive interrogation began of everyone who had had contact, official or private, with him. Several dozen women – wives and daughters of party officials, actresses, opera singers, professional prostitutes – were questioned about his sexual techniques. Witnesses came from Baku and Tbilisi to testify that Beria was a British spy who had begun as an Azeri nationalist.
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Six of Beria’s men, Dekanozov, Merkulov, Vlodzimirsky, Meshik, Goglidze and Bogdan Kobulov – all from Tbilisi except Pavel Meshik, a Ukrainian – were included in the indictment. Hoping to escape their master’s fate, they were cooperative. Beria’s medical records added to the indictment, showing that he frequently had intercourse knowing he was infected with venereal diseases. Fantastic accusations against Beria were made by his servants – that he stuffed women’s bodies down the drains or dissolved them in sulphuric acid – but these were not used in court.

Beria held up well, but when Rudenko finally read out an indictment a hundred pages long he held his hands to his ears and went on hunger strike. The trial was held behind closed doors in the second half of September 1953 with no defence lawyers. The chiefjudge was Marshal Konev, a fighting general with no legal training. Another judge was General Moskalenko, arrested by Beria in 1938. Moskalenko had the buttons cut off Beria’s trousers to stop him jumping up and down in the dock.
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Just as he refrained from citing Stalin as his accomplice – he had been warned not to – Beria gallantly asked the court to withhold the names of female witnesses testifying to his moral depravity. None expressed any affection for him; the mother of one even demanded Beria’s property as compensation for her daughter’s lost honour. Beria’s own cousin Gerasime Beria gave evidence that he had been a Menshevik spy when in prison in Kutaisi. Even Beria’s son Sergei linked him to enemies of the people. Witnesses accused Beria of engineering murder after murder, from the infamous Tbilisi aeroplane crash of 1925 that killed Mogilevsky, Atarbekov and Aleksandr Miasnikian to Solomon Mikhoels’s death in Minsk.

Beria’s six henchmen denied him all merit and virtue, and gave
graphic accounts of prisoners beaten not just on his orders but by his own hand. Beria admitted charges that were self-evidently true – murders of innocent citizens, membership of the Azeri Musavat party, sexual intercourse with minors – but denied everything else: he had not plagiarized his book on Stalin’s leading role in the Caucasus; he had not protected foreign spies.

The sentence for Beria and his co-defendants on 23 December 1953 was, as expected, death.
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All were shot on the same night. For Beria a special execution cell was set up, with a wooden shield to which he was tied so that no ricochet could injure the spectators. Beria was dressed in his best black suit for death. He faced his executioners with courage and tried to speak but Rudenko had his mouth stuffed with a towel. There was a scuffle among the officers over who would fire the first bullet. In the event, General Batitsky, who had been guarding Beria for six months, shot him straight in the forehead, and the body was wrapped in canvas and driven to the crematorium. Only the prison carpenter who had made the shield and brought Beria his food was upset by the spectacle.

Beria’s relatives were hounded and deported to the Urals, Kazakhstan and Siberia. Mirtskhulava wrote from Georgia on 25 August 1953, ‘His close relatives are busy with baseless vicious conversations, they are sources for the spreading of various provocational rumours. Beria’s mother, Marta Beria, a deeply religious woman, visits churches and prays for her son, an enemy of the people.’
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Beria’s two female cousins were imprisoned for complaining about his fate.

Khrushchiov and Malenkov were not consistent in punishing Beria’s associates and Stalin’s other surviving hangmen. Many languished in prison. Bogdan Kobulov’s younger brother Amayak and Solomon Milshtein were not executed until October 1954. Shalva Tsereteli, the illiterate aristocrat who had specialized in abduction and murder, was flown from retirement to Moscow and shot. Lev Shvartsman again simulated insanity – he claimed to have invented a miraculous loom – but was shot in April 1955. Akvsenti Rapava, the head of the Georgian MVD, was not shot until November 1955. The last to die, in April 1956, was Shvartsman’s sadistic partner Boris Rodos.
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In April 1957 Aleksandr Langfang was the last, perhaps the vilest, of Beria’s henchmen to be tried. He defended himself vigorously: ‘If you’re trying me, why not try Molotov, whose guilt is proven?’ When the
prosecutor demanded twenty-five years, Langfang asked for shooting on the grounds that he would be murdered in prison. The Soviet supreme court appealed against Langfang’s sentence of ten years. He finally got fifteen. Constantly protesting his honour, Langfang served his sentence and then lived a further eighteen years.
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Others got off more lightly: Leonid Raikhman, described by his interrogator as ‘a large, terrible beast, experienced, sly, skilful, one of the immediate perpetrators and creators of lawlessness’, served one year in prison before the amnesty of 1957, and then lived until 1990.

Those who had served Beria and then Abakumov in foreign intelligence, such as Naum Eitingon and Pavel Sudoplatov, were given tolerable prison conditions. Beria’s more intellectual friends were also treated gently. The novelist Konstantine Gamsakhurdia never had to account for his twenty years’ friendship with Beria and even acquired moral authority and wealth as Georgia’s greatest living writer, living like a feudal lord in Tbilisi and preparing his son to rule their country. Petre Sharia, the editor of Stalin’s Georgian works, went back to prison, where he again wrote verse:

It’s hurtful, bitter to perish, not knowing why.

For I have nothing to repent of, or to struggle with!

If only I knew what fateful force

Burns me so slowly on the fire.

Like others in prison for their links to Beria, Sharia spent a decade locked up with polite warders, access to books and an unshaken belief in Stalin, before retiring to Tbilisi. His dying words, however, were, ‘I’m choking in blood.’
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Ivan Serov was well rewarded for his treachery. He headed Khrushchiov’s new KGB and died of old age in 1990. Kruglov, however, was pensioned off in 1958, expelled from the party and evicted from his large apartment for ‘involvement in political repression’. He was run over by a train in 1977. Some, like Mikeil Gvishiani, who murdered even more Chechens than Kruglov, were saved from retribution by being sons-in-law of prominent party leaders. Gvishiani merely lost his general’s rank in November 1954 for ‘discrediting himself’. The same demotion was suffered by Vasili Mikhailovich Blokhin, the NKVD’s chief executioner;
a sick man, he died at the age of sixty in 1955. Nadaraia, Beria’s executioner and, with Sarkisov, his pimp, spent a short time in prison. Aleksandr Khvat, the torturer of Vavilov, was still receiving a generous pension in the 1990s.

Abakumov knew Beria had fallen when his interrogations began again; they were perfunctory, however, merely selecting material for his indictment. Abakumov was moved to the Lubianka where doctors could keep him alive. Malenkov did not care about Abakumov’s arrests of Jews or doctors; it was the framing of the aviation ministers in 1946 and of the Leningrad party in 1949 for which Malenkov wanted revenge. The officers’ club in Leningrad where Kuznetsov and Voznesensky had been sentenced to death was therefore chosen for the trial of Abakumov and five of his henchmen. Abakumov had recovered enough to fight back. He blamed Beria and Riumin for his plight; he had only obeyed Stalin’s orders in torturing his victims. He and three of his men were sentenced to death. Abakumov had no idea that the sentence would be carried out immediately and was saying, ‘I shall write to the Politbiuro—’ when the bullet hit him on 19 December 1954.
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Lavrenti Tsanava, even though arrested by Beria was kept in prison by Malenkov and Khrushchiov. He hanged himself in October 1955. Ignatiev’s deputy, the cautious Ogoltsov, was released by Khrushchiov in August 1953. He was deprived of his general’s rank for ‘discrediting himself while working in the organs’ but lived on his pension until 1977. Ignatiev, the minister who had supervised the persecution of the Jews, was sent by Malenkov to the foothills of the Urals as Bashkir party secretary. He enjoyed an early, and long, retirement.

Riumin, who had tortured the Jews and the doctors, had to face the music. Completely isolated, Riumin did not know Beria had fallen when he wrote to him in August 1953:

Dear Lavrenti Pavlovich, in the past, when I went to the Central Committee,
my thoughts often turned to you, I always expected valuable advice,
help and protection from you. Now I have come to be deeply aware how
hard it is to endure the tears of children, wives and mothers… Now I
am overwhelmed every minute by the tears of three children, my wife
and my mother who is living (if she hasn’t died) her last days with heavy
grief. Dear Lavrenti Pavlovich, I beg you
forgive
.
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Abakumov’s consolation was that his tormentor Mikhail Riumin was executed five months before him, on 7 July 1954.

Rukhadze, the fabricator of the Mingrelian affair against Beria, had expected to be released but remained in prison and was shot in 1955. By contrast, after a short spell in jail, Professor Grigori Mairanovsky, chief poisoner to Iagoda, Ezhov and Beria, reapplied to the KGB and continued his work in a laboratory in Dagestan.

The party elite – Kaganovich, Khrushchiov, Malenkov, Molotov and Voroshilov – had as many deaths on their consciences as Beria or Abakumov but died in their beds, surrounded by their families. Except for Khrushchiov, who had glimmers of humanity as well as peasant cunning, they died quite uncontrite.

The Soviet Union and its successor states have never achieved what psychiatrists call closure. Khrushchiov’s ‘destalinization’ was essentially a series of political manoeuvres to achieve sole power at the expense of his co-conspirators Molotov and Malenkov. It was impossible for him, and for the rest of the old guard such as Mikoyan, to entirely renounce Stalin without offering themselves up for trial as murderers. Many victims of Stalin, Trotskyists for instance, had in Khrushchiov’s and his successor Brezhnev’s eyes deserved their fate. Survivors of the GULAG and relatives of those executed received not justice, not even an act of contrition, but a ‘rehabilitation’ that consisted of an often mendacious certificate and a month’s salary. Whenever Soviet historians or novelists dared to take destalinization a step further, the brakes were applied – books were banned, people lost their jobs – and the public were upbraided about the sanctity of Lenin’s heritage and the ‘positive’ aspects of Stalin’s leadership. Even after perestroika, when historians began to publish archival secrets and mass graves were opened up, the KGB – soon to be the FSB – took part in the process in order to limit and then stop the revelations.

It is a paradox that Russia’s two greatest novelists Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoi in all their work insisted that only by full confession could the crimes of the past be absolved and life become endurable again, yet today’s Russian state refuses to abjure Stalin and his hangmen. Denunciations have either come from non-governmental organizations – Memorial, the Sakharov Centre – using whatever material they have been
able to compile or extract, or else from men who, like Khrushchiov, were up to their neck in blood. Stalin and his secret services are still lauded in print and in official speeches. The official myth, passively or actively believed by much of the population, is that Stalin’s murders and terrorism were aberrations into which he was inveigled by Ezhov and Beria. Today’s secret police, the FSB, take pride in their Cheka ancestry. They foster the cult of themselves as Dzierżyński’s samurai, this time protecting the Russian nation, rather than the working class, against its enemies. It takes breathtaking ignorance to regard Menzhinsky’s and Iagoda’s murderers as noble warriors who fell victim to an inferior tribe of butchers under Ezhov and Beria, but the corrupt Russian media and ramshackle educational system do little to dissipate it. The dwindling number of victims receive no recognition of their suffering; their elderly torturers get big pensions and parade their medals with pride.