306
Voroshilov, sacked and humiliated, seems to have respectfully resented Stalin too. His wife used to whisper that Stalin was jealous of Klim’s popularity—another unthinkable heresy.
307
Stalin diligently added the following phrases in his handwriting: “For a long time, Comrade Stalin warned us our success had shadows… Thoughtlessness is good for our enemies who sabotage us…” They were the “slavemasters and cannibals of U.S.A. and England… What about the people who inspired the killers? They can be sure we’ll repay them… As long as there is wrecking, we must kill thoughtlessness in our people.”
308
After Stalin’s death, Mikoyan told his sons that “if we didn’t have war when he was alive, we won’t have war now.” This was ironic since for all Stalin’s paranoia, inconsistencies and risk-taking in foreign policy, it was the clumsy and impulsive Khrushchev who brought the world closest to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
309
Evita had died of ovarian cancer on 26 July 1952.
310
Perhaps the other two waited outside in their ZiS. Ignatiev must also have been present. But already, it seems, Beria had taken control. No one knows who stopped the anti-Semitic media campaign that night. Suslov was the CC Secretary in charge of Ideology, but who ordered him to put it on hold? It remains a mystery.
311
Five telling letters were supposedly found under a sheet of newspaper in Stalin’s desk, Khrushchev told A. V. Snegov, who could only remember three of them to the historian Roy Medvedev. The first was Lenin’s letter of 1923 demanding that Stalin apologize for his rudeness to his wife, Krupskaya. The second was Bukharin’s last plea: “Koba, why do you need me to die?” The third was from Tito in 1950. It was said to read: “Stop sending assassins to murder me… If this doesn’t stop, I will send a man to Moscow and there’ll be no need to send any more.”
312
Khrushchev and Bulganin did protect Ignatiev who became a CC Secretary but Beria later managed to get him sacked for his part in the Doctors’ Plot. Yet he was merely reprimanded and sent to Bashkiria as First Secretary before moving on to run Tataria. Khrushchev presented him as a victim not a monster in his Secret Speech. Most of the top Chekists of the Doctors’ Plot, including Ogoltsov, who had commanded Mikhoels’ murder, and Ryasnoi were protected under Khrushchev, and later under Brezhnev. Khrushchev’s punishment of Stalin’s crimes was highly selective. Ignatiev received medals on his seventieth birthday in 1974. The luckiest of Stalin’s MGB bosses, he was the only one to die, respected, in his bed aged seventy-nine in 1983.
