for their men.”4
While the old Generalissimo basked in the sun pulling the strings in Korea, he was also killing his own men. On 29 September, Kuznetsov and Voznesensky were tried at the Officers’ Club in Leningrad before an MGB audience. Before the trial finally started, the accused were ordered to leave Zhdanov out of their testimony. The main accused were sentenced to death by shooting next day and the Politburo endorsed the sentences. “He’d sign first,” admitted Khrushchev, “and then pass it around for the rest of us to sign. We’d sign without even looking…” Did they sign the death list over dinner on the veranda?
Kuznetsov defiantly refused to confess, which outraged Stalin and embarrassed Abakumov:
“I’m a Bolshevik and remain one in spite of the sentence I have received. History will justify us.” The accused were said to have been bundled into white sacks by the Chekists and dragged out to be shot. They were killed fifty-nine minutes after midnight on 1 October, their families exiled to the camps.
There is some evidence that Stalin marked the lists with symbols specifying how they were to die. Voznesensky may have been kept alive for a while because Stalin later asked Malenkov: “Is he in the Urals? Give him some work to do!” Malenkov informed Stalin that Voznesensky had frozen to death in the back of a prison truck in sub-zero temperatures.
After Stalin’s death, Rada Khrushcheva asked what had happened to Kuznetsov: “He died terribly,” replied her father, “with a hook through his neck.”5
This little massacre consolidated the power of Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev and Bulganin—the last men standing as Stalin entered his final years—but it was the swan song of Abakumov. That sensuous, flashy sadist would soon roll up his bloody carpet for good. Perhaps it was over-confidence that led him to close the Jewish Case in March 1950: no one was released. The tortures were so grievous that one victim counted two thousand separate blows on his buttocks and heels.
Yet as that main case temporarily subsided, Stalin was orchestrating another anti-Semitic spasm from his holiday. Anti-Semitism now “grew like a tumour in Stalin’s mind,” said Khrushchev, yet he himself praised it in
Stalin was particularly fascinated by a case against Jewish managers in the prestigious Stalin Automobile Plant that made his limousines: they had sent Mikhoels a telegram celebrating the foundation of Israel.
“The good workers at the factory should be given clubs so they can beat the hell out of those Jews at the end of the working day,” Stalin told Khrushchev in February.
“Well, have you received your orders?” Beria asked sardonically. Khrushchev, Malenkov and Beria, that inseparable threesome, summoned the Jewish ZiS managers to the Kremlin and accused them of “loss of vigilance” and complicity in an “anti-Soviet Jewish nationalistic sabotage group.” The terrified manager fainted. The three magnates had to resuscitate him with cold water. Stalin released the manager but two Jewish journalists, one a woman, who had written about the factory, were executed. His personal intervention made the difference between life and death. Another Jewish manager, Zaltsman, was saved because, during the war, he had sent Stalin a desk set shaped like a tank with the pens forming the guns.
The Jews were not Stalin’s only target: his suspicions of Beria were constantly fanned by the ambitious Mgeladze, his boss in Abkhazia, who shrewdly revealed Beria’s crimes and vendettas of the late thirties. Stalin encouraged him and denounced Beria during their chats over dinner. Mgeladze’s was only one voice that informed Stalin of how corruptly the Mingrelians ran Georgia. Beria was a Mingrelian, so was Charkviani who had run it since 1938. Stalin ordered Abakumov to check the notoriously venal Georgia, and build a case against the Mingrelians, not forgetting Beria himself: “Go after the Big Mingrelian.”6
On 18 November, towards the end of his holiday, Stalin agreed to arrest the first Jewish doctor. Professor Yakov Etinger, who had treated the leaders, was bugged talking too frankly about Stalin. Etinger was tortured about his “nationalistic” tendencies by one of Abakumov’s officers, Lieut.-Col. Mikhail Riumin, who forced him to implicate all the most distinguished Jewish doctors in Moscow but he somehow failed to please his boss. Abakumov ordered Riumin to desist but the officer tortured Etinger so enthusiastically that he died of “heart paralysis”—a euphemism for dying under torture. Riumin was in trouble—unless he could destroy Abakumov first.
Abakumov was not guilty of idleness: Stalin was now redoubling the repression. Arrests intensified. In 1950 there were more slaves in the Gulags—2.6 million—than ever before. But Abakumov knew too much about the Leningrad and Jewish cases. Worse, Stalin sensed the foot-dragging of the MGB—and Abakumov himself. It was Yagoda all over again—and he needed a Yezhov.
The brakes on the Jewish Case, the rumours of corruption, the whispers of Beria and Malenkov, possibly the strutting bumptiousness of the man himself, turned Stalin against Abakumov. There was no sudden break but when Stalin returned from holiday,[294] just after his seventy-first birthday, on 22 December, he did not summon Abakumov. The weekly meetings ceased, as they had for Yagoda and Yezhov. Within the MGB snakepit, the ebbing of Stalin’s favour and the death of Etinger presented Riumin with an opportunity. “Little Mishka” or, as Stalin nicknamed him, “the Midget” or “Pygmy”—the “Shibsdik,” was the Vozhd’s second murderous dwarf.
56. THE MIDGET AND THE KILLER DOCTORS
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
