Stalin's Daughter (24 page)

She said, “I’ve already danced Papa, I’m tired.” With that, Stalin grabbed her by the forelock of her hair with his fist and pulled. I could see her face turning red and tears welling up in her eyes…. He pulled harder and dragged her back onto the dance floor.
⁴⁰

Svetlana denied that her father had ever pulled her onto the dance floor by the hair, but this birthday party would turn out to be her last encounter with him. Stalin was certainly drunk. Perhaps he was gloating. He was in the midst of engineering his last and most terrifying ideological campaign, the “Doctors’ Plot.”

On January 13, 1953, the TASS news agency published a government statement officially announcing the plot.

From the latest news.

Arrest of a group of subversive doctors.

Some time ago, the bodies of State Security uncovered a group of terrorist doctors who set themselves the task of cutting short the lives of prominent public figures in the Soviet Union by administering harmful treatments.
⁴¹

The editorial in
Pravda
that day was titled “Evil Spies and Murderers Masked as Medical Professors.” The “killer doctors” were called “murderers in white coats.” Nine doctors, six of them Jewish, were identified by name.

Dr. Yakov Rapoport, a distinguished Soviet pathologist, was arrested on February 3. In a memoir, he described the atmosphere of the time:

We were aware of a marked thickening of the political and social atmosphere, a thickening oppression that was near the point of suffocation. The feeling of alarm, the premonition of dire and inevitable disaster, achieved a nightmare intensity at times, supported, moreover, by actual facts.
⁴²

The public, whipped into a frenzy by news reports, cursed the bloody killers and thirsted for revenge. People refused to be treated by Jewish doctors.

Dr. Rapoport was arrested as a murderer and a member of an anti-Soviet terrorist organization. Like all the doctors, he was submitted to a “secret lifting,” the MGB
^*
term for a sudden disappearance. The MGB men came for the targets in the middle of the night, searched all their belongings, and confiscated savings passbooks, bonds, and any money. This was a strategy to impoverish the families in order to see which fellow conspirators would come to their aid. Encountering the wife or children of an arrested person on the street, people averted their eyes. The prisoners were carted off to Lubyanka or Lefortovo prisons. Having no clue as to what was going on, the remaining family members waited in terror for the secret police to return.

Dr. Rapoport remembered that “initially the Doctors’ Plot had no nationalistic coloring; both Russian and Jewish doctors were implicated. But before long it was given an anti-Semitic slant.”
⁴³
Jews could be found in all strata of Soviet society, and Russia’s long history of anti-Semitism could be counted on to induce people to believe any slanders against them. All Stalin needed was the doctors’ confessions. The well-tried strategy was simple: “If they confess, it must be true.”

It is also virtually certain that a “Writers’ Plot” would have come next. A report from a source at the Writers Union, sent to the Central Committee’s Department of Propaganda, claimed that the
Literary Gazette
“pandered to Jews and was dominated by Jews.” Its editor, the well-known writer and war hero Konstantin Simonov, was purportedly Simonovich, born to a Jewish family and the son of a publican on the estate of Countess Obolenskaya. In fact, Simonov was not Jewish. He was the son of Princess, not Countess, Obolenskaya and his father was Mikhail Simonov, a colonel in the tsar’s army. Simonov
laughed when he heard this slander, but he would soon grow very concerned to discover that he was identified as head of a group of people in Moscow’s literary world connected to the cosmopolitan conspiracy. His editor warned him: “There are some bastards out to get you who want to dig your grave, come what may. And just remember, absurd though it is, it was all said with such seriousness that I couldn’t believe my ears.”
⁴⁴
This was how one became a target.

Svetlana recalled the atmosphere of that last year. “During the winter of 1952–1953 the darkness thickened beyond all endurance.”
⁴⁵
It was “terribly trying for me, as for everyone. The whole country was gasping for air. Things were unbearable for everyone.”
⁴⁶
So many relatives, friends, and acquaintances were in jail or camps: her aunts and cousin for “babbling” too much, Polina Molotov for Zionist plotting, and Lena Stern as a member of the Jewish anti-Fascist Committee. She had consulted Stern for advice on the treatment of tubercular meningitis for the child of a close friend.
⁴⁷

Svetlana listened as Valechka, her father’s faithful housekeeper, told her that Stalin was “exceedingly distressed at the turn events took.” Valechka had heard him say that “he didn’t believe the doctors were ‘dishonest’ and that the only evidence against them was the ‘reports.’ “
⁴⁸
But even Svetlana must have known by now that this was pro forma for her father. Stalin, the consummate actor, pretended to sit back as others brought reports to him of enemies, whom he could not refuse to punish, while of course he was the puppet master manipulating the strings behind the scenery.

At the time, Svetlana heard rumors that a third world war with the West was imminent. A friend of her brother, an artillery colonel, told her, “Now it’s the time to begin, to fight and to conquer, while your father is still alive. At present we can win.”
⁴⁹
Was this war plot truly afoot? Vasili’s friends were
hotheads and unreliable, but George Kennan, the American ambassador to the USSR, was expelled after only four months. Still, it is unlikely that Stalin was planning outright war. Some historians believe he was in the process of organizing a major deportation of Jews, though this is based only on hearsay. Whatever was going on, the doctors’ fates hung in the balance. And the pressure was unbearable. Everyone was afraid to speak. Everyone was silent, “very still as before a storm.”
⁵⁰

And then Stalin died.

*
The NKGB (People’s Commissariat for State Security) was renamed the MGB (Ministry for State Security) in 1946.

Chapter 10
The Death of the
Vozhd

Svetlana at her father’s funeral in March 1953.

O
n March 2, Svetlana was summoned from her French class at the Academy of Social Sciences and told that a car was waiting outside to take her to Kuntsevo. She felt a sudden vertigo. No one but her father ever phoned her from Kuntsevo. Something was wrong—she hadn’t been able to reach him in days. When she’d phoned, the guards told her not to come, it was not a suitable time, and to stop phoning.
¹

On the evening of the first, she’d felt so uneasy that she’d driven to the dacha of her friend Lucia Shvernik. They’d watched a silent movie called
The Station Master
, based on a
story by Pushkin in which an old man dies at the roadside searching for his long-lost daughter. When the daughter finally returns to her village, she finds only her father’s grave. “I wept over that movie,” Svetlana recalled. “It absolutely hit me. [My father] was calling me. It was a silent call. I was probably the only person in the world he would have called for.”
²
The comment is poignant but hardly true. As he lay dying on the evening of March 1, it is unlikely that Stalin was sending a silent call for help to Svetlana, however much she may have longed for him to do so. It is heartwrenching that she imagined he was.

Everything to do with Stalin involves some mystery or intrigue. His slow death is no exception. What actually happened in his last days? The broad outline is as follows.

On the night of February 27, Stalin went to the Bolshoi Theater to attend a performance of Tchaikovsky’s
Swan Lake.
The next day was Svetlana’s twenty-seventh birthday, but her father did not invite her to accompany him.

The next evening, he summoned four members of his Politburo—Beria, Malenkov, Bulganin, and Khrushchev—to the Kremlin for their usual evening film, again completely ignoring his daughter’s birthday. Of the dinner on the evening of February 28, Khrushchev reported that Stalin appeared “sprightly and cheerful.” The men returned to his Kuntsevo dacha for the usual Georgian buffet. Supposedly, one of the subjects Stalin brought up was the interrogation of the doctors.

“Have the doctors confessed?” Stalin is reported to have asked. “Tell Ignatiev [head of the MGB] if he doesn’t get full confessions out of them, we’ll shorten him by a head.” Beria replied, “They’ll confess…. We’ll complete the investigation and come to you for permission to arrange a public trial.”
³

The credibility of this conversation is questionable—after the fact, each participant shaped his own version for self-serving
ends—but the suggestion that a public show trial of the doctors was in the making is not far-fetched.

Khrushchev described the end of the evening thus:

As usual dinner lasted until five or six o’clock in the morning. Stalin was pretty drunk after dinner and in very high spirits. He didn’t show the slightest sign that anything was wrong with him physically. When it was finally time for us to leave, he came into the vestibule to show us out. He was joking boisterously, jabbing me playfully in the stomach and calling me “Nikita” with a Ukrainian accent, as he always did when he was in a good mood. So after this particular session we all went home happy because nothing had gone wrong at dinner. Dinners at Stalin’s didn’t always end on such a pleasant note.
⁴

According to the report of his guards, Stalin then lay down on the divan in his “little dining room,” and told them, “You can take a nap too. I won’t be calling you.”

The following morning, March 1, Stalin’s staff waited for his summons. He usually rose around eleven a.m. The guards’ anxiety mounted as no sound emanated from his room all day. Still, none of them had the nerve to disturb him. Finally at six p.m., a light went on in his room. Stalin was obviously awake, but he didn’t call, and unless he called, no one dared enter the room.

Around ten p.m., the Kremlin courier arrived with a packet of mail from the Central Committee. Stalin’s bodyguard, Pyotr Lozgachev, in charge of mail delivery, walked with a firm step along the corridor toward his suite—one never crept up on Stalin. He described the scene:

There was the Boss lying on the floor holding up his right hand. I was petrified. My hands and legs wouldn’t obey
me…. He couldn’t speak…. I hurried up to him and said: “Comrade Stalin, what’s wrong?” He’d wet himself while he was lying there…. I said, “Shall I call the doctor, maybe?” He made some incoherent noise—like Dz—dz … all he could do was keep on “dz”-ing. His pocket watch and a copy of
Pravda
were lying on the floor…. [The watch] showed 6:30, so 6:30 was when it must have happened…. I raised the receiver of the house phone.
⁵

By the time the other guards arrived, the boss was unconscious. They moved him onto the sofa in the large dining room. They phoned Beria; Ignatiev, who was now in charge of Stalin’s personal security; and Malenkov, who phoned Khrushchev and Bulganin, and then they waited. Lozgachev claimed that his hair turned white that night.
⁶
No one phoned a doctor.

Stories conflict. Supposedly the five men came at different times, saw Stalin sleeping peacefully, and left, annoyed that the guards had called. “Don’t cause a panic,” Beria is reported to have reprimanded them. Khrushchev said that they didn’t need to be there when Stalin woke up to discover himself in such an “unseemly” condition: he had lain in his own urine all evening.
⁷

The doctors were not called until seven a.m. (other reports say nine a.m.) on the morning of March 2, twelve and a half hours after Stalin’s fall and nine hours after he’d lost consciousness. Theories percolate that the delay was a deliberate effort to deprive Stalin of necessary medical attention. It is just as likely that all those present, including Stalin’s colleagues, were too frightened to make any decisions. If Stalin regained consciousness, he might see the summoning of a doctor as a treasonous plot to seize power. Certainly it was not the most opportune time for Stalin to require the services of a doctor.