232
If there was a sell-out, it had probably occurred much earlier at the Moscow Foreign Minister’s Conference in October 1943. Nonetheless, Stalin was surely delighted to leave Yalta with Foreign Secretary Eden’s signature on the agreement to return all “Soviet” ex-POWs, many of them White Cossack emigres from the Civil War who had fought for the Nazis. Many were either shot or perished in Stalin’s Gulags.
233
In the higher levels of the Bunker, Hitler’s secretary discovered “an erotic fever seemed to take possession of everybody. Everywhere even on the dentist’s chair, I saw bodies interlocked in lascivious embraces. The women had discarded all modesty and were freely exposing their private parts.”
234
The jawbone and a portion of skull were kept in Moscow; the rest of his cadaver was tested by Smersh and then buried beside a garage at a Soviet army base in Magdeburg where it remained until KGB Chairman Yury Andropov ordered it cremated and the ashes scattered in April 1970.
235
The NKVD had mended all the electrical systems of Babelsberg and, as at Yalta, they even brought their own fire brigade. More than that, Stalin had his own “organized store of economic supplies with 20 refrigerators… and 3 farms—a cattle farm, a poultry farm and a vegetable farm” plus “2 special bakeries, manned by trusted staff and able to produce 850 kg of bread a day.”
236
Beria had also secured as much uranium as possible in a special operation in the ruins of Berlin: he and Malenkov reported to Stalin they had found “250 kgs of metallic uranium, 2 tons of uranium oxide and 20 litres of heavy water” at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, rounded up key German physicists, and spirited all this treasure back to the USSR. Roy Medvedev in his
237
Stalin was a regicide who constantly compared himself to monarchs: he even joked with his Yugoslav visitors, “Maybe Molotov and I should marry princesses,” a prospect that no doubt sent a shiver through the
238
This may be the reason this story appears in none of Mountbatten’s biographies and is told here for the first time. I am grateful to Hugh Lunghi for both his interview on the episode and his generous gift of his unpublished official minutes.
239
Many of the Soviet leaders had their own zoos or menageries: Bukharin had collected bear cubs and foxes. Khrushchev had fox cubs and deer; Budyonny, Mikoyan and Kaganovich kept horses.
240
On 17 January 2003, the Russian Prosecutor confirmed the existence of forty-seven volumes of files on Beria’s criminal activities which were gathered on his arrest after Stalin’s death. Even though the case against him was entirely political, with trumped-up charges, the files confirm the dozens of women who accused him of raping them. The State television network RTR was allowed to film the handwritten list of their names and telephone numbers. The files will not be opened for another twenty-five years.
241
To this day, Beria’s illegitimate children are well known among Moscow and Tbilisi society: they include a highly respected Georgian Member of Parliament and a Soviet matron who married the son of a member of Brezhnev’s Politburo. After the war, Stalin changed the People’s Commissariats to Ministries so that the NKVD and NKGB became the MVD and MGB. The State Defence Committee, the GKO, was abolished on 4 September 1945. The Politburo once again became the highest Party body though Stalin ruled as Premier, leaving the Party Secretariat to Malenkov.
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Recently, Beria’s house—now the Tunisian Embassy—has yielded up some of its secrets: in 2003, the 50th anniversary of Beria’s death, the Tunisian Ambassador confirmed that alterations in the cellars had exposed human bones. Who were they? Tortured Enemies or raped girls? We shall probably never know. There is of course no proof that Beria is to blame—but anything, no matter how diabolical, seems possible in his case.
