Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

commissar to Altshuler's department at Sarov to keep an eye on the miscreant.

What Zavenyagin called Altshuler's “hooliganism” prompted a second confrontation in 1952, this time between Yuli Khariton and Beria himself. Altshuler had spoken out on cultural matters. Vannikov ordered the physicist flown to Moscow and examined him personally, Altshuler remembers:

He explained to me how bad a man I was. He put my dossier on the desk. “You're working in an installation so secret even the party secretaries don't know about it and you're proposing your own party line in music, literature and biology. If we let just anyone say whatever he wants, we'd be crushed.” The Soviet Union was a fortress and everybody around — Europe, the United States, China — was preparing for war. One of the managers at Sarov would declare in a meeting, “One day war will come, and with our bombs we will hit our enemies, the United States.” Even after Stalin was gone we lived in this atmosphere.

Altshuler was threatened with exile. Khariton called Beria to save him. The Sarov scientific director “telephoned Beria directly and told him that the project needed Altshuler,” Khariton and Yuri Smirnov report. “After a long pause, Beria asked a single question: ‘Do you need him very much?’ After receiving a positive response, Beria said ‘All right,’ and hung up. The incident was closed.”

If anyone needed reminding of Beria's brutality, an incident Khariton recalls from that period must have served:

Beria met with about thirty people in his Kremlin office to discuss the preparation of the test site for the first thermonuclear explosion. Those making reports were trying to say where the equipment should be located, what kind of structures should be erected and how, and what kind of experimental animals should be placed at the site to study the impact of the blast effects. Suddenly, Beria became incensed. He interrupted angrily, moving from one briefer to another, asking strange questions which were not easy to answer.

Finally, Beria completely lost his temper. He screamed: “I will tell you myself!” Then he started to talk nonsense. It gradually became clear from his stormy monologue that he wanted everything at the test site to be totally destroyed in order to provide the maximum terror.

“The participants left the meeting in a gloomy mood,” Khariton concludes.

The Soviet Union had a gaseous-diffusion plant now, producing kilogram quantities of U235 per day, and a heavy-water pile for tritium. After problems with the chemical separation of lithium isotopes that drew further threats from Beria (“We have plenty of room in our prisons,” he told the responsible official, an MVD general), a physicist working with Lev Artsimovich developed an electromagnetic separation system and produced enough lifhium6 to make lithium⁶ deuteride for Sakharov's layer-cake thermonuclear. Alt-shuler's team conducted the first model experimental tests of the design's hydrodynamic parameters in the summer of 1952.

Since the Soviet scientists were building an Alarm Clock, which was limited by its awkward massiveness to around a megaton in yield, Beria's espionage apparatus had evidently not encountered the megaton-range Teller- Ulam configuration. The Mike shot came as a surprise to the Soviets; Pavlovsky reports that “the procedure of sampling radioactive explosion products in the Pacific zone” — sniffer aircraft, surface ships or submarines — “was not available.” American sailors on leave from the Mike task force who wrote home or called home from Hawaii quickly broke the story of the Ivy test to the world, however, and Sarov attempted to analyze Mike fallout in snow samples collected “in the central belt of Russia.” Sakharov remembers an emotionally upset chemist absentmindedly pouring the concentrated snowmelt down the drain. Pavlovsky notes that the fission products which they might have been able to trace — beryllium7 and U237 — would have decayed in any case to background levels by the time they had circled three-quarters of the globe and come around to the USSR. More to the point, he says, attempts to analyze the Mike fallout “failed due to one simple reason: we just could not perform such analysis at that time.” On the other hand, public accounts of the Mike shot made it obvious that the device had produced a multi-megaton yield; the Soviet scientists would have understood that the United States had achieved a breakthrough beyond layer cakes and alarm clocks. That knowledge was not immediately useful to them because they had no way of knowing what the breakthrough might be, but it spurred them to push completion of the layer- cake device as a counterweight to the new US monopoly.

On the last evening of his life, February 28,1953, Joseph Stalin had dinner at Kuntsevo, his dacha just outside Moscow, with Beria, Georgi Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin. The seventy-three-year-old Soviet dictator had been suffering from dizzy spells and had recently returned from a Crimean vacation. Bulganin, who was Minister of Defense, briefed him that evening on the status of the Korean War, advising that the war had reached a point of stalemate. Stalin decided then, according to Dmitri Volkogonov, that “he would tell Molotov next day to advise the Chinese and North Koreans to ‘try to get the best deal they could in talks,’ but in any event to try to bring the armed conflict to a halt.” Beria reported on the continuing interrogation of a group of Jewish doctors whom Stalin suspected of plotting against him; in Beria's cellars most of them had already confessed to working for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee — “the Joint,” Beria called it contemptuously. “The threads run deep,” the Minister of Internal Security warned his master, “and are linked to party and military officials.” Stalin began a long diatribe, Volkogonov reports, against “people in the leadership who thought they could get by on their past merits. ‘They are mistaken.’” At four a.m. on the morning of March 1, Stalin finally stood and left the room. The people in the leadership, with their Kremlin pallors, took their merits home.

When Svetlana Stalin was called out of French class the following day, March 2, and driven to Kuntsevo, she found her father surrounded by doctors, nurses and the ministers of the Presidium. The Soviet dictator was unconscious by then; he had suffered a stroke. The doctors worked him over, his daughter reports, “making a tremendous fuss, applying leeches to his neck and the back of his head, making cardiograms and taking X rays of his lungs. A nurse kept giving him injections… Everyone was rushing around trying to save a life that could no longer be saved.” Alone in his chambers after he had left the room on March 1, Stalin had collapsed and had lain unattended through the day and the evening until almost midnight because the servants were afraid to enter his private rooms unsummoned. They had alerted the leadership then; Volkogonov says Beria had arrived drunk in the wolf hours before dawn on March 2 and had thrown everyone out again, shouting at them that “Comrade Stalin is sound asleep”; the other members of the Presidium had timidly followed his lead and abandoned their leader once more, only returning later that morning with the doctors in tow. Observing the crowd around her dying father, Svetlana noticed that Beria “was behaving in a way that was nearly obscene — His face, repulsive enough at the best of times, now was twisted by his passions… He was trying so hard at this moment of crisis to strike exactly the right balance, to be cunning, yet not too cunning.” It took Stalin several days to die. When he did so, Beria wasted not a second, Svetlana accuses. “He darted into the hallway ahead of anybody else. The silence of the room where everyone was gathered around the deathbed was shattered by the sound of his loud voice, the ring of triumph unconcealed, as he shouted, ‘Khrustalyof! My car!’”

Malenkov and Beria had maneuvered to take over the Central Committee Presidium, with Malenkov as chairman, while the old monster still lay dying. In the months after Stalin's death, Beria consolidated his security organizations into a new MVD with a substantial army as well as police and security forces. He proposed abandoning some of Stalin's vast construction projects, repudiated the Doctors’ Plot and requested amnesty for a million zeks, not including political prisoners. “The most astonishing thing that happened after Stalin died,” correspondent Harrison Salisbury reported from Moscow, “was the quickness with which symptoms of a thaw appeared.”

It was Beria's thaw, a strategy for taking power. He might have succeeded, but he made the mistake of pushing through the Presidium a plan to liberalize the regime in East Germany to stop the bleed of East Germans fleeing to the West — half a million since 1951. In mid-June 1953, the East German Politburo rubber-stamped much of the “new course” but resisted lowering labor norms. Beria's liberalization in East Germany had the effect Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalization would have again thirty years later throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union: workers rioted in the streets and had to be put down with Soviet tanks.

Khrushchev rallied Malenkov, Molotov, Bulganin, Pervukhin and other members of the Presidium to oust Beria after the East German debacle. He probably also won support within the Soviet military. He organized a small force of officers led by the commander of the Moscow air defense system, K. S. Moskalenko, that included Marshal Zhukov and young Leonid Brezhnev and secreted them in a room adjoining Malenkov's office before a Presidium meeting there on the afternoon of June 26. Beria arrived open-collared and casual, unsuspecting, his guards and