her the limousine to take her there. “I won’t give you the car—you’re not studying well.” But Rada went under her own steam.
287
“Dear Svetochka,” Stalin wrote to Svetlana in hospital on May 1950. “I got your letter. I’m glad you got off so lightly. Kidney trouble is a serious business. To say nothing of having a child. Where did you ever get the idea I’d abandoned you? It’s the sort of thing people dream up. I advise you not to believe your dreams. Take care of yourself. Take care of your daughter too. The State needs people even those born prematurely. Be patient a little longer—we’ll see each other soon. I kiss you my Svetochka. Your ‘little papa.’” He did not devote all his time to the Leningrad Case. During these days, he also supervised the creation of the new Soviet Encyclopaedia, deciding every detail from its quality of paper to its contents. When the editor asked if he should include “negative persons” such as Trotsky, he joked, “We’ll include Napoleon, but he was a big scoundrel!”
288
Sergo and Alla were convinced this was “an intrigue by Malenkov and Beria who tricked Stalin. It’s amazing we believed this,” recalls Sergo. “But we never ONCE spoke about the case until after Stalin’s death.” His father allowed Sergo to see Kuznetsov’s son but not his wife because he knew she too would be arrested. As for the Kremlin children who lived in Granovsky Street, they noticed that suddenly their neighbours, the Voznesenskys and Kuznetsovs, had gone. “But no one mentioned it,” said Igor Malenkov, whose father was responsible. “I just concentrated on reading about sport.” Julia Khrushcheva “used to play with Natasha, Voznesensky’s daughter. Soon after her father’s arrest, I brought her home to our flat. But my mother said nothing.” The etiquette of unpersonage differed from family to family: while Natasha Poskrebysheva went on playing with Natasha Voznesenskaya, Nadya Vlasik “crossed the road whenever she saw her.” I am especially grateful to Sergo Mikoyan for sharing his account of this story.
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They were now the heart of Stalin’s new inner “quintet,” along with Beria and Bulganin. Kaganovich enjoyed a partial return to favour. On Sundays, those two fat bureaucrat friends, Khrushchev and Malenkov, took bracing walks up Gorky Street, surrounded by phalanxes of secret policemen.
290
Mao had brought a treasure trove of Chinese gifts and several carriages of rice. The lacquer ornaments still hang on the walls of Molotov’s retirement flat on Granovsky and Stalin divided the rice among his courtiers. In return, Stalin presented him with the names of his Soviet agents in the Chinese Politburo. Back in Peking, Mao swiftly liquidated them.
291
Emelian Pugachev was the Cossack pretender claiming to be the dead Emperor Peter 111 who led a massive peasant rebellion against Catherine the Great in 1773–74.
292
Stalin admired Chou and President Liu Shao-chi as the most “distinguished” of Mao’s men but he thought that Marshal Chu-Teh was a Chinese version of “our Voroshilov and Budyonny.”
293
Even Svetlana’s husband was now involved. In the Central Committee machine, Yury Zhdanov, Stalin’s son- in-law, that highly qualified paragon of Soviet education, reported to the orchestrator of the anti-Semitic hunt, Malenkov, that some scientists “had flooded theoretical departments of… Institutes with its supporters, Jews by origin.”
294
“I want to delay my return because of bad weather in Moscow and the danger of flu. I’ll be in Moscow after the coming of frost,” Stalin wrote to Malenkov on December 1950.
295
As in 1937, the Terror first destroyed the leadership of the MGB itself which was now arrested. Colonel Naum Shvartsman, one of the cruellest torturers since the late thirties and a journalist expert at editing confessions, testified that he had had sex not only with his own son and daughter but also with Abakumov himself, and, at night when he broke into the British Embassy, with Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, a momentous diplomatic development in Anglo-Soviet relations that had mysteriously passed unnoticed at the Court of St. James. Shvartsman claimed to have been poisoned with “Zionist soup”—an idea that harks back to the infamous plot by Enemies in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast during the thirties to poison Kaganovich’s gefilte. But he also delivered what Stalin wanted, implicating Abakumov, that unlikely Zionist sympathiser.
296
Vlasik was despatched to be Deputy Commandant of a labour camp in the Urals whence he rashly bombarded Stalin with protestations of his innocence. But this did not place Beria in charge of his bodyguards who remained under Ignatiev’s MGB.
