ask no questions and proffer few opinions. Stalin did the talking, reminiscing about his stay with Oleg’s father in Vienna in 1913, his “first time with a Western-style family.” Otherwise Stalin just told him to rest but “it was hardly possible to describe anything to do with Stalin as restful.”
Troyanovsky, like every other guest, fretted about how to escape without offending Stalin. After nine nights, he plucked up the courage to ask Stalin if he could leave. Stalin seemed surprised until Troyanovsky explained that he was returning to Moscow to become a Party member.
“An important event,” said Stalin. “Good luck.” Presenting Troyanovsky with a basket of fruit, there was an awkward but telling moment as he saw him off: “It’s probably boring for you here. I’ve got used to loneliness. I got accustomed to it in prison.”3
On his return to Moscow on 21 November, this genial old host ordered Abakumov to murder the Yiddish actor, Mikhoels. Nine days later, he supported the UN vote for the creation of Israel.
52. TWO STRANGE DEATHS
The Stalin Prize Committee sent Mikhoels to Minsk to judge plays at Belorussian theatres. When this was reported to Stalin, he verbally ordered Abakumov to murder Mikhoels on the spot, specifying some of the details with Malenkov present. Abakumov gave the task to his deputy, and the Minsk MGB boss, invoking the
On 12 January, Mikhoels and his friend Vladimir Golubov-Potapov, a theatre critic and MGB agent, spent the day meeting actors, then dined at their hotel. At 8 p.m. they left the hotel to meet Golubov’s “friend.” Presumably the MGB car took them to Tsanava’s dacha where Mikhoels was probably injected with poison to stun him, another job for the MGB’s doctors. Perhaps he fought back. This exuberant artist, the last connection with the intellectual brilliance of Mandelstam and Babel, loved life and must have struggled. He was smashed on the temple with a blunt object, and shot too. Golubov, the duplicitous bystander, was killed as well. The bodies were then driven into town, run over with a truck and left in the snow.[279]
Stalin was informed of the killings probably before the bodies had been dumped in the street, and just as Svetlana was arriving to visit him at Kuntsevo. Stalin was on the phone, most likely to Tsanava: “Someone was reporting to him and he listened. Then to sum up, he said, ‘Well, a car accident.’ I remember his intonation very well—it was not a question, it was a confirmation… He was not asking, he was proposing it, the car accident.” When he had put down the phone, he kissed Svetlana and said, “Mikhoels was killed in a car accident.”
At seven the next morning, two bodies were found sticking out of the snow. Mikhoels’s body was returned to Moscow and delivered to the laboratory of Professor Boris Zbarsky, the ( Jewish) biochemist in charge of Lenin’s mummy: noticing the damaged head and the bullet hole, he was ordered to prepare the victim of the “road accident” for the lying-in-state in the Jewish Theatre, where no one was fooled by his “broken face” and “mutilated features made up with greasepaint.”
Mikhoels was an artistic hero to some of Stalin’s courtiers as well as to the public: on the 15th, the night before the funeral, Polina Molotova, who had rediscovered her Jewish roots during the war, quietly attended the lying-in-state and muttered, “It was murder.” After the funeral, Yulia Kaganovich, the niece of Lazar and daughter of Mikhail who had committed suicide in 1941, arrived at the Mikhoels’ and led his daughter into the bathroom. Here, with taps running, she whispered: “Uncle sends his regards,” adding an order from the anxious Kaganovich: “He told me to tell you—never ask anyone about anything.” The Jewish Theatre was renamed for Mikhoels; a murder investigation was opened. The Jewish Committee continued, and Stalin would be the first to recognize Israel.
However, out of the public eye, Mikhoels’ murderer, Tsanava, received the Order of Lenin “for exemplary execution of a special assignment from the government.” Zhenya Alliluyeva was sentenced to ten years, her daughter Kira to five years, “for supplying information about the personal life of [Stalin’s] family to the American Embassy.” Anna Redens also got five years. They were placed in solitary confinement.[280]
The MGB now started to build a case against Deputy Foreign Minister Solomon Lozovsky and other prominent Jews: Polina Molotova was quietly sacked from her job. Stalin openly joked about his own antiSemitism, teasing Djilas about Jews in the Yugoslav leadership:
“You too are an anti-Semite, you too…”1
Zhdanov, despite his “red puffy face and lively movements,” recovered his heartiness and power: “I might die at any moment and I might live a very long time,” he told Djilas. At dinners, he tried to resist alcohol and ate nothing but a plate of clear soup.
For a sick man, the next few months could hardly have been less restful: Stalin now encountered his first real opposition for almost twenty years. Marshal Tito was no vassal. His Partisans had fought valiantly against the Germans and not depended on the Red Army to liberate them. Now, the Yugoslavs bitterly denounced Zhdanov’s “dictatorial behaviour” at the Cominform conference. When Stalin read this, he could not believe the impertinence of it, scrawling in brown crayon: “Very queer information!”
Stalin had agreed to leave Greece to the West, reserving the right to choose when and where to confront America. Tito disregarded his orders and started to supply the Greek Communists. Stalin was determined to test American resolve in Berlin, not in some obscure Balkan village. The final straw was the planned Balkan federation agreed between the Bulgarian leader, (ex-Comintern chief) Dmitrov, and Tito, without Stalin’s permission. As the row heated up, Tito sent his comrades, Milovan Djilas and Edvard Kardelj, to negotiate with Stalin. At grisly Kuntsevo dinners, Stalin, Zhdanov and Beria tried to overawe Yugoslavia with Soviet supremacy. Djilas was fascinated but defiant. So, on 28 January,
On 10 February, Stalin summoned the Yugoslavs and Bulgarians to the Little Corner to humiliate them, as if they were impudent Politburo members. Instead of opposing the Bulgarian–Yugoslav plan, he proposed a collage of little federations, linking countries that already hated each other. Stalin was “glowering and doodling ceaselessly.”
“When I say no it means no!” said Stalin who instead proposed that Yugoslavia swallow Albania, making gobbling gestures with his fingers and gulping sounds with his lips. The scowling threesome—Stalin, Zhdanov and Molotov—only hardened Tito’s resistance.
Stalin and Molotov despatched an eight-page letter implying that Tito was guilty of that heinous sin— Trotskyism. “We think Trotsky’s political career is sufficiently instructive,” they wrote ominously but the Yugoslavs did not care. On 12 April, they rejected the letter. Stalin decided to crush Tito.
“I’ll shake my little finger,” he ranted at Khrushchev, “and there’ll be no more Tito!” But Tito proved a tougher nut than Trotsky or Bukharin.2
At Kuntsevo dinners, Zhdanov, the heir apparent but increasingly a frail alcoholic with a sick heart, “sometimes lost the willpower to control himself” and reached for the drink. Then Stalin “shouted at him to stop drinking,” one of the rare moments he tried to restrain the boozing, a sign of Zhdanov’s special place. But at other times, the pasty-faced, sanctimonious Zhdanov, sitting prissily and soberly while Stalin swore at Tito and smirked at scatological jokes, outraged him: “Look at him sitting there like Christ as if nothing was any concern to him! There —looking at me now as if he were Christ!”
Zhdanov blanched, his face covered with beads of perspiration. Svetlana, who was present, gave him a glass of water but this was only a routine eruption of Stalin’s blazing temper that usually passed as suddenly as it struck. Nonetheless, Stalin was increasingly irritated by Zhdanov’s over-familiar smugness and independence of mind. Beria and Malenkov were aided in their vengefulness from a surprising quarter.
Chosen by Stalin, growing closer to Svetlana and, at twenty-eight, Head of the CC Science Department, Yury
