Abakumov remains the most shadowy of Stalin’s secret-police bosses just as the post-war years remain the murkiest of Stalin’s reign, although we now know much more about them. The coming atrocities were Abakumov’s doing, not Beria’s, even though most histories blame the latter. Beria, who, as Deputy Premier in charge of the Bomb and the missile industry, now moved his office from the Lubianka to the Kremlin, was henceforth “sacked” from the Organs. He bitterly resented it.
“Beria was scared to death of Abakumov and tried at all costs to have good relations…” recalled Merkulov. “Beria met his match in Abakumov.” Like a rat on a sinking ship, Beria’s pimp Colonel Sarkisov denounced the sexual degeneracy of the Bolshevik “Bluebeard” to Abakumov who eagerly took it to Stalin: “Bring me everything this arsehole will write down!” snapped Stalin.
48. ZHDANOV THE HEIR AND ABAKUMOV’S BLOODY CARPET
Abakumov, tall with a heart-shaped, fleshy face, colourless eyes, blue-black hair worn broussant, pouting lips and heavy eyebrows, was another colourful, swaggering torturer, amoral condottiere and “zoological careerist” who possessed all Beria’s sadism but less of his intelligence.[256] Abakumov unrolled a blood-stained carpet on his office floor before embarking on the torture of his victims in order not to stain his expensive Persian rugs. “You see,” he told his spy Leopold Trepper, “there are only two ways to thank an agent: cover his chest with medals or cut off his head.” He was hardly alone in this Bolshevik view.
Until Stalin swooped down to make him his own Chekist, Victor Abakumov was a typical secret policeman who had won his spurs purging Rostov in 1938. Born in 1908 to a Moscow worker, he was a
Abakumov dealt directly with Stalin, seeing him weekly, but never joined the dining circle: “I did nothing on my own,” he claimed after Stalin’s death. “Stalin gave orders and I carried them out.” There is no reason to disbelieve him. He cultivated Stalin’s children. At one Kremlin dinner, “he suddenly started, jumped up and obsequiously inclined his head before a short and reddish-haired girl”—Svetlana Stalin. Stalin’s grandeur was such that people now bowed to his daughter. Abakumov went drinking with Vasily Stalin. Together, they fanned the Aviators’ Case. Vasily purloined Novikov’s dacha while the “father of the Soviet air force” was tortured. Stalin asked for Abakumov’s recommendations:
“They should be shot.”
“It’s easy to shoot people,” replied Stalin. “It’s more difficult to make them work. Make them work.” Shakhurin received seven years’ hard labour, Novikov ten years—but their confessions implicated bigger fish.
On 4 May, Malenkov was abruptly removed from the Secretariat. His family remembered that they had to move out of their dacha. Their mother took them on a long holiday to the Baltic. Malenkov was despatched to check the harvest in Central Asia for several months, but never arrested. Beria tried to persuade Stalin to bring him back, which amused the Generalissimo: “Why are you taking such trouble with that imbecile? You’ll be the first to be betrayed by him.”
Beria had lost his Organs and his ally, Malenkov, so the success of the Bomb was paramount. Later in the year, he rushed to Elektrostal at Noginsk, near Moscow, to see Professor Kurchatov’s experimental nuclear reactor go critical, creating the first Soviet self-sustaining nuclear reaction. Beria watched Kurchatov raise the control rod at the panel and listened to the clicks that registered the neutrons rise to a wail.
“It’s started!” they said.
“Is that all?” barked Beria, afraid of being tricked by these eggheads. “Nothing more? Can I go to the reactor?” This would have been a delicious prospect for millions of Beria’s victims but they dutifully restrained him, so helping to preserve the diminished Beria.
The reversal of fortunes of Beria and Malenkov marked the resurrection of their enemy, Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s special friend, that hearty, pretentious intellectual who, after the stress of Leningrad, was a plump alcoholic with watery eyes and a livid complexion. Stalin openly talked about Zhdanov as his successor. Meanwhile, Beria could hardly conceal his loathing for Zhdanov’s pretensions: “He can just manage to play the piano with two fingers and to distinguish between a man and a bull in a picture, yet he holds forth on abstract painting!”1
“The Pianist” had become a hero in Leningrad where he was apt to boast that the siege had been more important than the battle for Stalingrad. Sent as Stalin’s proconsul in Finland in 1945, he mastered Finnish history, displayed an encyclopaedic knowledge of Helsinki politics and even charmed the British representative there. When he pushed to annex Finland (a Russian duchy until 1917), Molotov reprimanded him: “You’ve gone too far… You’re too emotional!” But none of this harmed his standing with Stalin who recalled him from Leningrad and promoted him to Party Deputy in charge of both Agitprop and relations with foreign Parties, making him even more powerful than he had been before the war. His family, particularly his son Yury, became close to Stalin again. Indeed, they wrote to him
Zhdanov had played his cards cleverly since returning in January 1945. He consolidated his triumph over Malenkov and Beria by persuading Stalin to promote his own camarilla of Leningraders to power in Moscow: Alexei Kuznetsov, the haggard, long-faced and soft-spoken hero of the siege, received Malenkov’s Secretaryship. Zhdanov understood that Stalin did not wish Beria to control the MGB so he suggested Kuznetsov to replace him as
By February 1946, with Stalin in semi-retirement, Zhdanov seemed to have control of the Party as well as cultural and foreign policy matters, and to have neutralized the Organs and the military.[257] Zhdanov was hailed as the “second man in the Party,” its “greatest worker,” and his staff whispered about “our Crown Prince.” Stalin toyed with appointing him General Secretary. During 1946, Zhdanov signed decrees as “Secretary” alongside Stalin as Premier: “the Pianist” was so important that the Yugoslav Ambassador noticed how, when a bureaucrat entered his office, he bowed “to Zhdanov as he was approaching” and then retreated backwards, managing to cover “six or seven yards and in bowing himself out, he backed into the door, nervously trying to find the doorknob with his hand.” At the November parade, Zhdanov, in Stalin’s absence, took the salute with his Leningrad camarilla filling the Mausoleum.
Yet his health was weak.[258] Zhdanov never wanted to be the successor. During Stalin’s serious illnesses, he was terrified at the prospect, telling his son, “God forbid I outlive Stalin!” 2
Stalin and Zhdanov picked up where they had left off before the war, debating how to merge the patriotic Russianness of the war with the Bolshevism of the Revolution in order to eradicate foreign influence and restore morality, pride and discipline. Like two crabby professors, obsessed with the greatness of nineteenth-century culture and repulsed by the degeneracy of modern art and morals, the old seminarist and the scion of provincial intelligentsia reached back to their youths, devising a savage attack on modernism (“formalism”) and foreign influence on Russian culture (“cosmopolitanism”). Poring over poetry and literary journals late into the night, these two meticulous, ever-tinkering “intellectuals,” who shared that ravenous Bolshevik appetite for education, cooked up the crackdown on the cultural freedom of wartime.
