Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

297

Stalin protected Charkviani because the leader had been taught the alphabet as a boy by a Father Charkviani. Stalin moved him to work as a CC Inspector in Moscow. But Beria was powerless to defend himself or his proteges. When the Mingrelian secret policeman Rapava, who was a family friend of the Berias, was arrested, his wife bravely set off secretly to Moscow to ask Nina Beria’s help. But when the desperate woman called Beria’s house, Nina was too scared to come to the phone. The German housekeeper Ella said, “Nina cannot come to the phone.” This was how the Mingrelians realized that Beria himself was in trouble.

298

Georgi Dmitrov, the Bulgarian leader, died in 1949.

299

One of the survivors of Stalin’s time, Maxim Litvinov, the Jewish ex–Foreign Commissar, managed to die in his bed on 31 December 1951. He was a perennial target of the MGB’s anti-Semitic cases. Molotov admitted that Litvinov should have been shot for his rambunctious indiscretions in the late war years: “It was only by chance that he remained among the living,” said Molotov chillingly. There was a plan to arrange a road accident a la Mikhoels but finally Litvinov died with his errant English wife by his bedside: “Englishwoman go home!” were his last words. “They did not get him,” said Ivy Litvinov who returned to London. Their daughter now lives in Brighton.

300

Andreyev had appealed to Malenkov in January 1949 to “check the treatment… I don’t feel good despite following doctors’ orders. My head’s dizzy… I almost fall over. I’m disastrous. I feel the treatment and diagnosis is wrong…” He was probably right since the cocaine was clearly the wrong medicine. He signed off: “I’m devilishly unhappy to be out of work.”

301

Chikobava told Stalin that some of his Armenian colleagues had been sacked for sharing his views so Stalin immediately got the Armenian boss, Arutinov, on the telephone and asked about the professors. “They were removed from their posts,” replied Arutinov. “You were in too much of a hurry,” replied Stalin and hung up. The professors were woken up immediately and restored to their positions. His meeting with Chikobava probably took place on 12 April 1950 just as he was discussing the timing of the Korean War; Stalin’s article was published on 20 June that year. Chikobava’s original letter was sent to Stalin by Candide Charkviani, then Georgian First Secretary, which shows the power of those with direct access to the Vozhd.

302

Molotov opened the Congress, Kaganovich spoke on the Party rules, and Voroshilov closed it, representing the status quo, which few guessed that Stalin was planning to radically overturn. But there were clues. Significantly Stalin changed the Party’s name from Bolshevik to Communist Party. In the new Presidium, Beria slipped from his usual third place after Molotov, and Malenkov to fifth after Voroshilov. Beria’s acolytes Merkulov and Dekanozov were dropped from the new CC.

303

Yet Stalin still remembered his loyalest retainer Mekhlis, who had suffered a stroke in 1949. Now dying at his dacha, all he longed for was to attend the Congress. Stalin refused, muttering that it was not a hospital but when the new CC was announced, he remembered him. Mekhlis was thrilled—he died happy and Stalin authorized a magnificent funeral.

304

One of these heirs would probably have been Mikhail Suslov, fifty-one, Party Secretary, who combined the necessary ideological kudos (Zhdanov’s successor as CC Ideology and International Relations chief) with the brutal commitment: he had purged Rostov in 1938, supervised the deportation of the Karachai during the war, suppressed the Baltics afterwards and presided over the anti-Semitic campaign. In 1948, he frequently met Stalin. Furthermore, he was personally ascetic. Beria loathed this “Party rat,” bespectacled, tall and thin as a “tapeworm” with the voice of a “grating castrate.” Roy Medvedev makes the educated guess that Suslov was “Stalin’s secret heir” in his new Neizvestnyi Stalin but there is no evidence of this. Suslov helped overthrow the de- Stalinizing Khrushchev in 1964 and became the eminence grise of the re-Stalinizing Brezhnev regime right up until his death in 1982. At the Plenum, Brezhnev himself was one of the young names elected to the Presidium. On his title, Stalin got his way: afterwards he appeared as the first “Secretary” but no longer as “General Secretary,” a change that persuaded some historians that he lost power at the Plenum. Until recently, the only account of this extraordinary meeting was Simonov’s but now we also have the memoirs of Mikoyan, Shepilov and Efremov.

305

The “Midget” plunged with the same speed that he had risen to an obscure desk in the Ministry of State Control and was replaced by SA Goglidze. Earlier, Stalin turned against his instrument in the Mingrelian Case, Georgian MGB boss Rukhadze, who had boasted of his intimacy with the Vozhd. “The question of Rukhadze’s arrest is timely,” Stalin wrote to Mgeladze and Goglidze on 25 June 1952. “Send him to Moscow where we’ll decide his fate!” Riumin, Goglidze and Rukhadze were all shot after Stalin’s death.