for Lozovsky—but it also had its dangers for that punctilious but murderous “clerk” Malenkov, because his eldest daughter Volya was married to the son of a Jewish official named Shamberg whose sister was married to Lozovsky.
“You sympathized…” with the Jewish Crimea, said Malenkov, “and the idea was vicious!” Stalin ordered Lozovsky’s arrest.
Malenkov extricated his family from its Jewish connections. Volya Malenkova divorced Shamberg. Every history repeats that Stalin ordered this divorce and that Malenkov enforced it. Volya Malenkova vigorously denies this, claiming that the marriage had not worked because Shamberg had married her for the wrong reasons—and had “bad artistic taste.” “My father even discouraged me saying, ‘Think carefully and seriously. You rushed into the marriage. Careful before rushing out of it.’” But this was not how it appeared to Shamberg, who was summoned to Malenkov’s office. Just as Vasily Stalin accelerated Svetlana’s divorce, so Malenkov’s bodyguard fixed Volya’s.[283]
As many as 110 prisoners, most of them Jews, were suffering “French wrestling” at the hands of the vicious Komarov in the Lubianka. “I was merciless with them,” boasted Komarov later, “I tore their souls apart… The Minister himself didn’t scare them as much as me… I was especially pitiless with (and I hated the most) the Jewish nationalists.” When Abakumov questioned the distinguished scientist Lina Shtern, he shouted at her: “You old whore… Come clean! You’re a Zionist agent!” Komarov asked Lozovsky which leaders “had Jewish wives,” adding, “no one is untouchable.” The prisoners were also encouraged to implicate the Jewish magnates, Kaganovich and Mekhlis, but Polina Molotova was the true target. Abakumov told Stalin that she had “contacts with persons who turned out to be Enemies of the People”; she attended synagogue once, advised Mikhoels, “attended his funeral and showed concern for his family.”
Five days later, Stalin gathered the Politburo to read out the bizarre sexual-Semitic accusations against Polina. A young man testified about having had an affair and “group sex” with this Bolshevik matron. Molotov could hardly believe this “terrible filth” but, as Stalin read on, he realised that “Security had done a thorough job on her!” Even the iron-bottomed Molotov was scared: “My knees trembled.” Kaganovich, who disliked Molotov, and as a Jew had to prove his loyalty, viciously attacked Iron-Arse, recalling how “Molotov couldn’t say anything!”
Polina was expelled from the Party for “close relations with Jewish nationalists” despite being warned in 1939, when Molotov had abstained on a similar vote. Now, remarkably, he abstained again but sensing the gravity of the case, he buckled. “When the Central Committee voted on the proposal to expel PS Zhemchuzhina… I abstained which I acknowledge to be politically incorrect,” he wrote to Stalin on 20 January 1949. “I hereby declare that after thinking the matter over, I now vote in favour… I acknowledge I was gravely at fault in not restraining in time a person close to me from taking false steps and from dealings with such anti-Soviet nationalists as Mikhoels…”
On 21 January, Polina was arrested in her squirrel-fur coat. Her sisters, doctor and secretaries were arrested. One of her sisters and a brother would die in prison. Her arrest was ominous for the other leaders who secretly sympathised with her.1
Polina, who was not tortured, denied everything: “I was not at the synagogue… It was my sister.” But she also faced more accusations of sexual debauchery: the confrontation with Ivan X reads like a bad farce: “Polina, you called me into your office [and] proposed intimacy!”
“Ivan Alexeevich!” exclaimed Polina.
“Don’t deny it!”
“I had no relationship with X,” she asserted. “I always regarded Ivan Alexeevich X as unreliable but I never thought he was a scoundrel.”
But X appealed to her mercy: “I remind you of my children and my broken family to make you admit your guilt towards me… You forced me into an intimate relationship.”
Meanwhile Polina continued to play the
No one heard anything more of Polina, who became Object No. 12. Many believed she was dead but Beria, who played little part in the Jewish Case, knew better from his contacts. “Polina’s ALIVE!” he whispered to Molotov at Politburo meetings.
Stalin and Abakumov discussed whether to make her the leading defendant in their Jewish trial but then decided Lozovsky would be the star. Polina was sentenced to five years in exile, a mild sentence considering the fates of her co-prisoners, in Kustanai, Central Asia. She turned to drink but overcame it. “You need three things” in prison, she told her daughters later, “soap to keep you clean, bread to keep you fed, onions to keep you well.” Ironically, she was befriended by some deported kulaks so that the innocent peasants, whom she and her husband had been so keen to liquidate, were the kind strangers who saved her life.
She never stopped loving Molotov, for during her imprisonment, she wrote: “With these four years of separation, four eternities have flowed over my strange and terrible life. Only the thought of you forces me to live and the knowledge that you may still need the remnants of my tormented heart and the whole of my huge love for you.” Molotov never stopped loving her: touchingly, he ordered his maids to lay a place for her at table every evening as he ate alone, aware that “she suffered because of me…”
Stalin now excluded Molotov from the highest echelons, scrawling that documents should be signed by Voznesensky, Beria and Malenkov “but not Comrade Molotov who doesn’t participate in the work of the Buro of the Council of Ministers.” However, he still trusted Mikoyan just enough to send that worldly Armenian on a secret mission to size up Mao Tse-tung who was about to complete his conquest of China.
The Chinese Civil War was in its last throes. Stalin had miscalculated how quickly Chiang Kai-shek’s regime would collapse. Until 1948, Mao Tse-tung’s success was an inconvenience to Stalin’s policy of a
On 31 January 1949, in great secrecy, Mikoyan reached Mao’s headquarters in Xibaipo in Hopei province where he met Mao and Chou En-lai and presented Stalin’s gifts. One present was typically venomous: Mikoyan had to tell Mao that an American at his court was a spy and should be arrested. Stalin (Comrade Filipov) kept in contact with Mikoyan (Comrade Andreev) through Mao’s Russian doctor, Terebin, who doubled as decoder. The visit was a success even though Mikoyan admitted that he had hoped for a rest from Stalin’s nocturnal habits, only to find that Mao kept the same hours.
On his return, Mikoyan found a shock awaiting him. Stalin sacked Molotov and Mikoyan as Foreign and Foreign Trade Ministers, though both remained Deputy Premiers. Then he accused Mikoyan of breaking official secrecy about his Chinese trip. Mikoyan had only told his son Stepan: “Did you tell anyone about my Chinese trip?” Mikoyan asked Stepan.
“Svetlana,” replied Stepan.
“Don’t blab.” An innocent comment by Svetlana to her father had endangered the Mikoyans. Stalin had not forgotten the arrest of Mikoyan’s children in 1943. They were still under surveillance.
“What happened to your children who were arrested?” Stalin suddenly asked Mikoyan ominously. “Do you think they deserve the right to study at Soviet institutions?” Mikoyan carefully did not reply—but he understood the threat, particularly after Polina’s arrest. He expected the boys to be arrested, yet nothing happened. Stalin started to mutter that Voroshilov was “an English spy” and hardly saw him[284] while the diminished Molotov and Mikoyan just hung on. But now Stalin’s chosen successors succumbed to the brutal vendetta of Beria and Malenkov in a sudden blood-bath.2
54. MURDER AND MARRIAGE
The “two scoundrels” played for only the highest stakes: death. But Stalin himself was always ready to scythe down the tallest poppies—those gifted Leningraders—to maintain his own paramountcy.
Stalin’s heir apparent as Premier, Nikolai Voznesensky, “thought himself the cleverest person after Stalin,” recalled the Sovmin manager, Chadaev. At forty-four, the youngest Politburo member distinguished himself as a
