56
Riumin, thirty-eight, plump and balding, stupid and vicious, was the latest in the succession of ambitious torturers who were only too willing to please and encourage Stalin by finding new Enemies and killing them for him. Unlike Yezhov, who had been so popular until he became an inquisitor, Riumin was already an enthusiastic killer even though he had passed eight school grades, qualifying as an accountant. As Malenkov showed, education was no bar to mass murder. He had his own problems. Dismissed for misappropriating money in 1937—and now in danger for killing the elderly Jewish doctor, the Midget decided to act. Perhaps to his own surprise, he lit the fuse of the Doctors’ Plot.
On 2 July 1951, Riumin wrote to Stalin and accused Abakumov of deliberately killing Etinger to conceal a Jewish medical conspiracy to murder leaders such as the late Shcherbakov. This brought together Stalin’s fears of ageing, doctors and Jews. It was not Beria but Malenkov who sent Riumin’s letter to Stalin. This is confirmed by Malenkov’s assistant though he claimed that Riumin wrote the letter “for his own reasons.” The Doctors’ Plot worked against Beria and the old guard like Molotov but this swelling case could threaten Malenkov and Khrushchev too. So often at Stalin’s court, a case would start coincidentally, be encouraged by some magnate and then be spun back at them by Stalin like a bloody boomerang. Malenkov sometimes allied himself with Khrushchev, sometimes with Beria, but it was always Stalin making the big decisions. Riumin’s allegation of medical murder may have been prompted by Stalin himself—or it may have been the spark that inspired him to reach back to Zhdanov’s death and create a maze of conspiracies to provoke a Terror that would unite the country against America outside and its Jewish allies within.
He now ordered Beria and Malenkov to examine the “Bad Situation at the MGB,” accusing Abakumov of corruption, ineptitude and debauchery. Around midnight on 5 July in the Little Corner, Stalin agreed to Malenkov’s suggestion to appoint Semyon Ignatiev, forty-seven, as the new boss. At 1 a.m., Abakumov was called in to hear of his downfall. At 1:40 a.m., Riumin arrived to receive his prizes: promotion to general and, later, Deputy Minister. Serving a short spell as a Chekist in 1920, Ignatiev was an eager, bespectacled CC bureaucrat who was a friend of Khrushchev and Malenkov. Indeed Khrushchev described Ignatiev as “mild and considerate” though the Jewish doctors would hardly have agreed with him. Beria again failed to regain control over the secret police. Henceforth Stalin himself ran the Doctors’ Plot through Ignatiev. Stalin sent Malenkov to tell the MGB that he wanted to find a “grand intelligence network of the U.S.A.” linked to “Zionists.”
The next day, 12 July, Abakumov was arrested. In the tradition of fallen secret policemen, his corruption was lovingly recorded: 3,000 metres of expensive cloth, clothes, sets of china, crystal vases—“enough for a shop”—were found in his homes. In order to build his flats Abakumov removed sixteen families and spent a million roubles to make a “palace” using two hundred workers, six engineers and the entire MGB Construction Department. Yet the downfall of monsters also destroyed the innocent: Abakumov’s young wife, Antonina Smirnova, with whom he had a two-month-old son, had received 70,000 roubles’ worth of presents, including an antique Viennese pram. So she was arrested: the destiny of the girl and the baby are unknown.295
Abakumov, no longer a Minister but just a number, Object 15, spent three months shackled in the refrigerator cell, being viciously interrogated by his nemesis, the Midget: “Dear LP,” he wrote pitifully to Beria, “I feel so terrible . . . You’re the closest man to me, and I wait for you to ask me back . . . You will need me in the future.”
Abakumov had been destroyed for failing to push the Jewish Case. Ignatiev and the egregious “Midget” Riumin set about torturing the Jewish officials of the JAFC and the doctors to “substantiate the evidence of espionage and nationalistic activity.”1
The impresario of this theatre of plots and pain was now ageing fast. He sometimes became so giddy that he fell over in his Kremlin apartment. The bodyguards had to keep a close eye on him because “he didn’t look after himself.” He hardly bothered to read all his papers. Kuntsevo was strewn with unopened boxes. He still corrected Bulganin’s speeches like a schoolmaster but then forgot Bulganin’s name in front of the rest of the Politburo: “Look, what’s your name?”
“Bulganin.”
“Right yes . . . that’s what I meant to say.”
Riven by arthritis, diminished by raging arteriosclerosis, dazed by fainting spells, embarrassed by failing memory, tormented by sore gums and false teeth, unpredictable, paranoid and angry, Stalin left on 10 August for his last and longest holiday. “Cursed old age has caught up with me,” he muttered. He was even more restless than usual, travelling from Gagra to New Athos, Tsaltubo to Borzhomi and back. At Lake Ritsa, the woods, lakeside and paths were peppered with strange green metal boxes, containing special telephones so Stalin could call for help if taken ill on a stroll.
But dizzy spells were not going to stop him cleansing his entourage: “I, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov—we’re all old . . . we must fill . . . the Politburo with younger . . . cadres,” he ominously told Mgeladze. Yet his paranoia gave him no rest: “I’m finished,” he told Mikoyan and Khrushchev who, like all the magnates, were on holiday nearby so they could visit Stalin twice a week. “I don’t even trust myself.”
At dinner, he surveyed his courtiers and “puffing out his chest like a turkey,” he embarked on that favourite but lethal subject—his successor. It could not be Beria because he “wasn’t Russian,” nor Kaganovich, a Jew. Voroshilov was too old. He did not even mention Mikoyan (an Armenian) or Molotov. It could not be Khrushchev because he was a “country boy” and Russia needed a leader from the intelligentsia. Then he named Bulganin, the very man whose name he tended to forget, as his successor as Premier. None were ideologically qualified to lead the Party but he had not mentioned Malenkov who perhaps took this as an encouraging sign. He ordered books and started frantically studying.
“Well, Comrade Stalin requires me to study political science.” Malanya, caught reading Adam Smith, asked a colleague, “How long will it take to master?”
The magnates were convinced that Stalin was becoming senile but actually he was never more dangerous, determined and in control. He lashed out in every direction, at his comrades, Jews, Mingrelians, even banana importers. The story of the bananas sums up the governing style of the ageing Stalin.
Vlasik learned a shipment of bananas had just arrived and eager to soothe the bad teeth of the Master, he bought some for Stalin. At dinner at Coldstream with all the magnates, Vlasik proudly presented the bananas. Stalin peeled one and found it was not ripe. He tried two more. They too were not ripe. “Have you tried the bananas?” he asked his guests. Stalin summoned Vlasik: “Where did you get these bananas?” Vlasik tried to explain but Stalin shouted: “These crooks take bribes and rob the country. What was the name of the banana ship?”
“I don’t know,” said Vlasik, “I didn’t take an interest . . .”
“Take an interest! I’ll put you on trial with the rest of them!” bellowed Stalin. Poskrebyshev rushed off to find out the name of the ship and order arrests. Malenkov pulled out his notebook and took notes. Stalin ordered Mikoyan to sack the new Trade Minister. But Beria was eager to beat Mikoyan to the banana, as it were.
The dinner ended at 5 a.m. At 6 a.m., Stalin called Beria to tell him to sack the Minister. When Mikoyan called Moscow just after 6 a.m., he found that Beria had already reprimanded the unfortunate. A few days later, Mikoyan arrived to say goodbye and Stalin was still talking about those bananas. The Minister was sacked. Charkviani wrote that this was typical of Stalin’s “eruptions leading to irrelevant decisions.” Stalin, concluded Mikoyan drily, “was simply very fond of bananas.”2
Stalin’s limbs ached but when he took the waters at Tsaltubo, the weather was too hot. He decided to take the waters at Borzhomi and visit a house with special memories. He had stayed at the Likani Palace, a neo-Gothic mansion owned by Grand Duke Michael, Nicholas II’s brother, overlooking the Kura River, with Nadya in happier times. It had become a museum and was barely habitable, without bedrooms, which suited Stalin. It suited his magnates less: he ordered Khrushchev and Mikoyan to stay too. They rushed over from Sochi and Sukhumi but, without beds, they had to camp together, sharing a room like Boy Scouts.
Stalin ate every day at a table laid under a tree by the Kura in idyllic lush countryside. When he went for walks, he cursed at the bodyguards, bumping into them by suddenly changing direction. He decided to visit Bakuriani but the locals mobbed his car, placing carpets and banqueting tables across the road. The supreme curmudgeon had to dismount and join his overexcited fans for a Georgian feast. “They open their mouths and yell like dunderheads!” he muttered, face twitching. He never made it to Bakuriani and returned to Abkhazia.
At the Palace, where Nadya had rested after Vasily’s birth, Stalin brooded on his family. Vasily, now pitifully ill with alcoholism, visited. “His health’s so poor, his stomach’s sick, he can’t even eat,” Stalin confided in Charkviani.
Like a Western millionaire booking his playboy son into the Betty Ford Clinic, Stalin intervened to enrol Vasily in a drying-out programme but here too he searched for a culprit and found one in the banana procurer: “Vlasik and his friends did it, they turned his drinking into an addiction!” Stalin had been cursing Vlasik’s corruption for years. A denunciation letter and Malenkov’s investigation into MGB venality revealed Vlasik’s orgies and shenanigans. Stalin was upset but felt mired in corruption. He finally sacked his most devoted retainer.296
Svetlana’s marriage to Yury was over after just two years. In a letter to her father, she called him a “heartless bookworm” and an “iceberg.” Stalin told Mgeladze that Svetlana wore the trousers:
“Yury Zhdanov’s not the head of that family—he can’t insist on anything. He doesn’t listen to her nor she to him. The husband should run a family . . . that’s the main thing.” But Yury himself would never dare ask Stalin for a divorce so Svetlana came to see him instead.
“I know what you want to say,” he said. “You’ve decided to divorce him.”
“Father,” Svetlana answered in a begging tone. Charkviani, who was present was embarrassed and excused himself but Stalin insisted he stay.
“So why’re you divorcing him?” Stalin asked.
“I can’t live with my mother-in-law. She’s impossible!”
“What does your husband say?”
“He supports his mother!”
Stalin sighed: “If you’ve decided to divorce him, I can’t change your mind, but your behaviour isn’t acceptable.” She blushed and left, walking out of the Zhdanov family and moving into a flat in the House on the Embankment with her two children.
“Who knows what next?” muttered Stalin.
“Stalin wasn’t too happy when it ended,” admits Yury, but he was not too surprised either. He did not hold it against Yury but invited him to stay at Lake Ritsa where they chatted half the night about Stalin’s visit to London in 1907. When they naturally talked about the campaign against cosmopolitanism, Zhdanov, who had played his own role in hunting out Jewish scientists, asked Stalin if he thought it was “assuming a lopsided national character,” meaning it was aimed too much against the Jews.
“Cosmopolitanism’s a widespread phenomenon,” replied Stalin. When he finally got up to go to bed in the early hours, he cited a Jewess he admired: “Maria Kaganovich—there’s a real Bolshevik! One should pay attention to social position, not national condition!” and he staggered off to sleep. In the morning the table was laid on the bank of Lake Ritsa and Yury watched Stalin peruse Pravda. “What are they writing about?” he snarled, reading out, “Long live Comrade Stalin, leader of all nations!”— and he tossed it away in disgust.
After entertaining other old friends, who complained that the Mingrelians were notoriously corrupt, Stalin headed back to New Athos and then dared Mgeladze to be there within seventeen minutes. The ambitious Abkhazian boss, who sensed his hours of chatting with the old man were about to bear fruit, made it in fifteen and finally convinced Stalin that Charkviani was running “a bordello!”
He furiously summoned the Georgian MGB boss, the crude, barrel-chested Rukhadze. “The Mingrelians are totally unreliable,” said Stalin, who in old age embraced the parochial hatreds of different regions of Georgia. Thousands of Mingrelians were arrested but Stalin wanted to destroy Beria. Perhaps he suspected that Lavrenti was no Marxist: “He’s become very pretentious . . . he’s not how he used to be . . . Comrades who dine with him say he’s utterly bourgeois.”
Stalin was “afraid of Beria,” thought Khrushchev, “and would have been glad to get rid of him but didn’t know how to do it.” Stalin himself confirmed this, sensing that Beria was winning support: “Beria’s so wily and tricksy. He’s become so trusted by the Politburo that they defend him. They don’t realize he’s pulled the wool over their eyes. For example— Vyacheslav [Molotov] and Lazar [Kaganovich]. I think Beria has his eye on a future goal. But he’s limited. In his time, he did great work but as for now . . . I’m not sure he wouldn’t misuse his power.” Then Stalin remembered his closest allies: “Zhdanov and Kirov thought poorly of him but . . . we liked Beria for his modesty and efficiency. Later he lost these qualities. He’s just a policeman.”
Ignatiev sent sixty MGB interrogators and a torture specialist carrying a special medical case filled with his instruments, down to Tiflis. Stalin phoned Charkviani, with whom he had spent hours discussing literature and family, and without saying hello, threatened:
“You’ve closed your eyes to corruption in Georgia . . . Things’ll go badly for you, Comrade Charkviani.” He hung up. Charkviani was terrified.
The Beria family, Nina and Sergo, sensed this tightening garrote. Stalin appointed Beria to give the prestigious 6 November address but three days afterwards, he dictated an order about a Mingrelian conspiracy that directly threatened Beria, using his wife Nina’s links to the Menshevik émigrés in Paris.
Vasily Stalin naïvely confided to Sergo Beria that relations between their fathers were “tense,” which he blamed on anti-Georgian Russians in the Politburo. Svetlana, who was so close to Nina, warned her that something was afoot. Beria’s marriage to Nina was under strain because Lilya Drozhdova had given birth to a daughter by Beria whom they named Martha after his mother. Lilya was now about seventeen and she had lasted as Beria’s mistress for a couple of years. The bodyguards told Martha Peshkova that when Lilya was at the dacha, the baby was placed in the same cradles as Sergo’s children. Not surprisingly, the arrival of the baby upset Nina. She unhappily decided she needed a separate life and built herself a cottage in Sukhumi.
On 22 December 1951, Stalin, like a lame, restless and hungry tiger, returned to Moscow, clearly intent on enforcing a new Terror, with specific anti-Semitic features. The torture chambers of Ignatiev and Riumin groaned with new Jewish and Mingrelian victims to destroy Molotov and Beria. Stalin did know how to “get rid” of Beria, but the “master of dosage” had always worked with agonizing patience. But now he was old. Stalin loathed Beria yet “when in a morose mood, he came to see us seeking human warmth.” Stalin admitted to Nina he could barely sleep anymore: “You can’t know how tired I am. I have to sleep like a gun dog.”
Beria played Stalin well: he shrewdly offered to purge Georgia himself. In March 1952, Beria sacked Charkviani,297 replaced him with Mgeladze and publically admitted: “I too am guilty.”
Stalin and Beria despised each other but were linked by invisible threads of past crimes, mutual envy and complementary cunning. Stalin still discussed foreign policy with Beria, even letting him write a paper proposing a neutral, reunified Germany. Beria could still manipulate the Generalissimo with what Khrushchev called “Jesuitical shrewdness” but he was too clever by half, riling Stalin. “You’re playing with a tiger,” Nina warned him.
“I couldn’t resist it,” replied Beria.
The gap between Beria’s dreams and his reality had made him “a deeply unhappy man,” wrote his son. Without the ideological fanaticism that bound the others to Stalin, Beria now questioned the entire Soviet system: “The USSR can never succeed until we have private property,” he told Charkviani. He despised Stalin, whom he considered “no longer human. I think there is only one word that describes what my father felt in those days,” wrote Sergo Beria. “Hatred.” Beria became ever more daring in his denunciations of Stalin: “For a long time,” he sneered sarcastically, “the Soviet State had been too small for Joseph Vissarionovich!” Always the most craven and most irreverent, he denounced Stalin but the other leaders were afraid to join in: “I considered it an attempt to provoke us,” said Mikoyan.
Yet, gradually, their shared fears and Stalin’s unpredictability created a “sense of solidarity,” a support system among ambitious killers who wanted to survive and protect their families. Even Beria became the unlikely avuncular comforter for bruisers like Khrushchev and Mikoyan in these uneasy times. The others revelled in Beria’s eclipse—and shared his fears. Malenkov warned him, Khrushchev teased him. Molotov and Kaganovich were so impressed with Beria that even when Stalin criticized him, they defended him. Yet any and all were ready to destroy the others. It was not long before Ignatiev and his MGB torturers were even trying to link Stalin’s two obsessions: Beria, they whispered, was secretly Jewish.3
That spring, Stalin was examined by his veteran doctor, Vinogradov, who was shocked by his deterioration. He suffered from hypertension and arteriosclerosis with occasional disturbances in cerebral circulation, which caused minor strokes and little cysts in the brain tissue of the frontal lobe. This exacerbated Stalin’s anger, amnesia and paranoia. “Complete rest, freedom from all work,” wrote Vinogradov on the file but the mention of retirement infuriated Stalin who ordered his medical records destroyed and resolved to see no more doctors. Vinogradov was an Enemy.
On 15 February, Stalin ordered the arrests of more doctors who admitted helping to kill Shcherbakov, which in turn led to Dr. Lydia Timashuk, the cardiologist who had written to Stalin about the mistreatment of Zhdanov. Stalin called in Ignatiev and told him that, if he did not accelerate the interrogations of the Jewish doctors already under arrest, he would join Abakumov in prison. The MGB were “nincompoops!”
“I’m not a supplicant of the MGB!” barked Stalin at Ignatiev. “I can knock you out if you don’t follow my orders . . . We’ll scatter your group!” He now talked more to his bodyguards and Valechka than to his comrades. The death of the Mongolian dictator Marshal Choibalsang in Moscow that spring worried him enough to confide in his chauffeur: “They die one after another. Shcherbakov, Zhdanov, Dmitrov, Choibalsang . . . die so quickly!298 We must change the old doctors for new ones.” The bodyguards could talk quite intimately to Stalin and Colonel Tukov replied that those doctors were very experienced. “No, we must change them for new ones . . . The MVD insists on arresting them as saboteurs.” Valechka heard him say he was not sure about the case. But Stalin was not for turning: he wanted the Jewish Crimea case to be tried imminently. Lozovsky and a distinguished cast of Jewish intellectuals again became the playthings of Riumin and Komarov.
Meanwhile, Vasily Stalin’s treatment for alcoholism had failed completely. At the May Day parade, the weather was bad and the planes should not have been allowed to fly but a drunken Vasily ordered the flypast to proceed. Two Tupolev-4 bombers crashed. Stalin watched darkly from the Mausoleum and afterwards sacked Vasily as Moscow air-force commander, sending him back to the Air Force Academy.4
Eight days later, at midday on 8 May, the “trial of the Jewish poets” starring Solomon Lozovsky, former Deputy Foreign Minister, and the Yiddish poet Perets Markish opened in the Dzerzhinsky Officers’ Club at the Lubianka. Stalin had already specified that virtually all the defendants were to be shot.
Lozovsky had been tortured but his pride in his Bolshevik and, more surprisingly, Jewish pedigrees was unbroken. His speech shines out of this primordial darkness as the most remarkable and moving oration of dignity and courage in all of Stalin’s trials. He also shredded Riumin’s imbecilic Jewish-Crimean conspiracy.
“Even if I had wanted to engage in such activity . . . would I have gotten in touch with a poet and an actor? . . . After all, there is an American Embassy . . . swarming with intelligence officers. The doorman at the Commissariat of Finance would not do such a thing, let alone the Deputy Foreign Minister!”
Lozovsky was so convincing that the judge, Lieut.-Gen. Alexander Cheptsov, stopped the trial, a unique happening which suggests that Stalin was forcing a new Terror onto an unwilling and no longer blindly obedient bureaucracy. Cheptsov complained of its flimsiness to Malenkov in the presence of a rattled Ignatiev—and humiliated Riumin. Malenkov ordered the trial to proceed. On 18 July, Cheptsov sentenced thirteen defendants to death (including two women), sparing only the scientist Lina Shtern, perhaps because of her research into longevity. But Cheptsov did not carry out the executions, ignoring Riumin’s shrill orders to do so, and appealed to Malenkov.
“Do you want to bring us to kneel before these criminals?” Malenkov retorted. “The Politburo has investigated this case three times. Carry out the Politburo’s resolution.” Malenkov admitted later that he had not told Stalin everything: “I did not dare!”
Stalin rejected official appeals. Lozovsky299 and the Jewish poets were shot on 12 August 1952.5
Stalin refused to take a holiday that August: instead, unhappy at the dominance of Malenkov and Khrushchev, he decided to call a Congress in October, the first one since 1939, to anoint new, younger leaders and destroy his old comrades.
By September, Ignatiev, assisted by “Midget” Riumin, had tortured the evidence out of his prisoners to “prove” that the Kremlin doctors, led by Stalin’s own physician, had indeed murdered Zhdanov, Shcherbakov, Dmitrov and Choibalsang. A new crop were arrested but not yet Vinogradov. On the 18th, Stalin told Riumin to torture the doctors. Riumin, who possessed a macabre gift for primitive theatre, designed a special torture chamber at Lefortovo, furnished like a dissection room and operating theatre, to intimidate the doctors. Long before Laurence Olivier played the Nazi dentist in Marathon Man, Stalin was torturing his own doctors in a ghastly surgical parody.
“You’re acting like a whore! You’re an ignoble spy, a terrorist!” Riumin shouted at one of the doctors. “We’ll torture you with a red-hot iron. We have all the necessary equipment for that . . .” Stalin’s family was included in a bizarre medical melodrama, spawned by Stalin’s furious imagination and Riumin’s diabolical obedience: the doctors had deliberately subverted Vasily Stalin’s treatment for “nervous disorders” and had failed to prevent toxicosis in Svetlana Stalin after the birth of her child Katya Zhdanov in the spring of 1950. A surreal touch, if any was needed, was added by the case of Andreyev who had been ill since 1947: the doctors prescribed cocaine for his insomnia so it was hardly surprising he was unable to sleep. Andreyev300 had become dependent on the drug, one of history’s more unlikely coke addicts.6
Absurd as the details may sound, the Doctors’ Plot had the beautiful enveloping symmetry of a panacea, one of Stalin’s fantastical masterpieces: working alone, only informing his grandees when he had results, and keeping complete control over all the parallel threads through the “Midget,” he weaved a tapestry that sewed together every intrigue and leading victim since the war, in order to mobilize the Soviet people against the external enemy, America, and its internal agents, the Jews, and therefore justify a new Terror. New research shows Stalin would toss into this cauldron various “murderous” Jews and doctors, Abakumov and his “unvigilant” Chekist “nincompoops,” and the executed Leningrader, Kuznetsov, who would be the link between the Jews, Zhdanov’s death, and the magnates—especially Mikoyan, via their children’s marriage. Just as in 1937 a man did not have to be a Trotskyite to be shot as one, so now the victims did not have to be Jewish to be accused of “Zionism”: Abakumov, no philo-Semite, was now smeared with Zionism. As for the sturdily Russian Molotov, Stalin had not nicknamed him “Molotstein,” in the twenties, for nothing.
Did Stalin really believe it all? Yes, passionately, because it was politically necessary, which was better than mere truth. “We ourselves will be able to determine,” Stalin told Ignatiev, “what is true and what is not.”
Stimulated by his labyrinth of secret investigations, Stalin did not give up his literary and scientific interests. As his brain atrophied, Stalin still “swotted like a good pupil,” as Beria put it, studying to dominate new fields and solve ideological problems. “I am seventy yet I go on learning just the same,” Stalin boasted to Svetlana. He read all the entries for the Stalin Prize and chaired the Committee to choose the winners in his office. That year, pacing as usual, he decreed that a novelist named Stepan Zlobin should win. Malenkov however pulled out a file and said, “Comrade Stalin, Zlobin conducted himself very badly when he was in a German concentration camp . . .”
Stalin walked round the table three times in dead silence then asked: “To forgive?” He continued pacing the table in silence. “Or not to forgive? To forgive or not to forgive?” Finally, he answered: “Forgive!” Zlobin won the prize. Stalin then attacked anti-Semitism: he had lately insisted that Jewish writers must have their Semitic names published in brackets after their Russian pseudonyms. Now he asked the surprised Committee: “What’s this for? Does it give pleasure to someone to underline that this man is Jewish? Why? To promote anti-Semitism?” As usual the old fox was playing several games in parallel.
He had always been interested in the study of linguistics: the field had been dominated by Professor Marr who had established Stalinist orthodoxy by arguing that language, like class, would ultimately disappear and merge into one language as Communism approached. A Georgian linguistics scholar, Arnold Chikobava, wrote to Stalin to attack the theory. Stalin, keen to buttress his national Bolshevism by overturning Marrism, summoned Chikobava to a dinner that lasted from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. taking notes diligently like a student. He then held an open debate in Pravda, finally intervening with his own article, “Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics” which immediately altered the entire field of Soviet science and ideology.301
Just before the Congress opened, Stalin proudly distributed the other fruit of his studies, his turgid masterpiece Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, which declared the “objectivity” of economic laws and reasserted the orthodoxy that the imperialist states would go to war, but it also leapt some of the stages of Marxism, to claim that Communism was achievable in his lifetime. Faith in ideology was always vital to Stalin but those old believers Molotov and Mikoyan did not agree with this “Leftist derivation.” When they came to dinner at Kuntsevo, Stalin asked: “Any questions? Any comments!” Beria and Malenkov, never ideologists, praised it. But even now, in danger of his life, Molotov would not agree with an ideological deviation. He just mumbled and Mikoyan said nothing.
Stalin noticed their silence and, later, smiled maliciously at Mikoyan: “Ah, you’ve lagged behind! Right now, the time has come!”
When they met to discuss the Presidium of the Congress, Stalin said, “No need to enter Mikoyan and Andreyev—they’re inactive Politburo members!” Since Mikoyan was immensely busy, the Politburo chuckled.
“I’m not joking,” snapped Stalin. “I suggest it seriously.” The laughter stopped instantly, but Mikoyan was included. Even at the height of his tyranny, Stalin had to feel his way in this close-knit oligarchy: Mikoyan and Molotov were prestigious Politburo titans, respected not only by their colleagues but by the public. Stalin proposed they expand the Politburo into a Presidium of twenty-five members. Mikoyan realized this would make it easier to remove the old Politburo members. “I thought— ‘something’s happening.’ ” Mikoyan was suddenly afraid: “I was just knocked off my feet.” They realized Stalin had meant it when he shouted:
“You’ve grown old! I’ll replace you all!”7
At 7 p.m. (to suit Stalin’s own timetable) on 5 October 1952, the Nineteenth Congress opened. The leaders sat bunched together on the left with the ageing Stalin alone on the right. Stalin himself only attended the beginning and the end of the Congress but giving the major reports to Malenkov and Khrushchev placed them in pole position for the succession.302 He only spoke at the end of the Congress for a few rambling minutes but a punch-drunk Stalin boasted to Khrushchev: “There, look at that! I can still do it!”
Khrushchev was ill during the Congress: when an old doctor visited him on Granovsky and treated him kindly, “I was tormented because I already had the testimony against the doctor. I knew no matter what I said, Stalin would not spare him.” But the real action was on 16 October at the Plenum to elect the Presidium and Secretariat. No one was ready for Stalin’s ambush.