These two men—Molotov in particular—were seen within the party and among the people as the
vozhd
’s natural heirs. This perception is specifically why Stalin chose to publicly discredit them by making it known that he did not consider them worthy leaders of the party and the country. Just what charges he brought against Molotov and Mikoyan we do not know, as there is no verbatim transcript of the plenum. Judging by the contradictory recollections of those who took part, Stalin concocted an amalgam of political smears, bending facts and quasi-facts to his purpose. He brought up Molotov’s supposed concessions to foreign correspondents and his mistakes at the 1945 foreign ministers’ conference and claimed that Molotov, with Mikoyan’s support, had proposed raising the procurement prices for grain in order to incentivize work by the peasants. These misdeeds were painted with the brush of “rightist opportunism.” Stalin may even have mentioned Molotov’s wife and his pro-Jewish sympathies.
127
In the end, the content of the criticism mattered little. The main point was obvious: nobody was worthy of succeeding Stalin. The only hope was that he would live on for many years. Molotov and Mikoyan came to the podium to express their devotion to Stalin. This too only underscored his greatness. Stalin’s manner signaled to the gathering that Molotov’s and Mikoyan’s justifications were not worth listening to. Before Mikoyan could finish what he was saying, according to one eyewitness, Stalin gave a dismissive wave of the hand. “The hall immediately began to react very emotionally, and people started to yell: ‘Enough of your self-justification!’ … ‘Stop trying to fool the Central Committee!’ Mikoyan wanted to say something else, but the hall interrupted him and he sat back down.”
128
This demonstration of devotion to the
vozhd
and disdain for apostates brought the plenum to a fitting end.
Despite being anathematized, Molotov and Mikoyan formally held onto most of their official powers—and, most important, their lives—but neither they nor any other member of Stalin’s inner circle could feel truly safe. There was also alarming news coming from the country’s socialist neighbors. In November 1952, shortly after the conclusion of the Nineteenth Party Congress, the Czechoslovak party leader Rudolf Slansky was put on trial along with other senior party officials. The defendants were found guilty and executed. Recent research has shown that Stalin exercised close personal control over the Slansky trial.
129
Slansky was a Jew, and his trial served as a prelude to Stalin’s next act of intimidation: the Doctors’ Plot.
The affair that has come to be known as the Doctors’ Plot, to which Stalin devoted a significant portion of his final months, unfolded within a general campaign of state anti-Semitism. The foundation of the case was information “dug up” by state security about murderous doctors, mostly Jewish, working in government health care facilities serving the Soviet leadership. Accusations against “wrecker doctors” who supposedly killed or plotted to kill Soviet leaders was a leitmotif of the political trials of the 1930s. Toward the end of his life Stalin returned to this theme, possibly because of anxiety about his own mortality or perhaps because he saw in the fabrication of a case against Kremlin doctors a way of putting pressure on their patients. Over many months, Stalin obsessively presided over the fabrication of evidence against Jewish doctors and their supposed patrons within the Ministry of State Security. His eagerness to lash out at this group led him to spew foul threats at Ignatiev, calling state security agents obese “hippopotamuses” and promising to drive them “like sheep” and “give it to them in the mug.”
130
During October and November 1952, when the curtain had closed on the first act of the drama taking place at the upper reaches of government, Stalin approved the arrest of a number of doctors, including Petr Yegorov, head of the body that oversaw Kremlin health services; Vladimir Vinogradov, Stalin’s personal physician; and two professors, Miron Vovsi and Vladimir Vasilenko. Stalin met with the heads of state security and instructed them to use torture on the arrestees.
131
On 15 November 1952, Ignatiev reported to him that these instructions had been carried out: “Means of physical coercion were used on Yegorov, Vinogradov, and Vasilenko and interrogation was intensified, especially in regard to foreign intelligence.… Two workers capable of carrying out special assignments (using physical punishment) in regard to particularly important and particularly dangerous criminals were selected and already used in this case.”
132
Stalin soon put the “confessions” extracted through these brutal techniques to use. On 1 December 1952, during a meeting of the Central Committee Presidium, questions tied to “wrecking within the field of medicine” and “information on the state of the USSR Ministry of State Security” were placed before the gathering. In keeping with his initial idea of collusion between “wrecker doctors” and state security “conspirators,” the main targets of Stalin’s attack were “Jewish nationalists” and chekists. At a subsequent Central Committee Presidium meeting on 4 December, a resolution titled “On the Situation in the Ministry of State Security” was adopted, calling for “active offensive actions” in intelligence work and intensified party control over the ministry. It defended the use of extreme methods in the fight against “enemies” with the idea that “Many chekists hide behind … rotten and harmful reasoning that the use of diversion and terror against class enemies is supposedly incompatible with Marxism-Leninism. These good-for-nothing chekists have descended from positions of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism to positions of bourgeois liberalism and pacifism.”
133
Stalin summed up this position more succinctly in a closed-door meeting: “Communists who take a dim view of intelligence and the work of the cheka, who are afraid of getting their hands dirty, should be thrown down a well head first.”
134
At some point Stalin decided that the Doctors’ Plot should be turned into a major campaign. In early January and with his active involvement, two press items were prepared: a TASS report about the arrest of a group of “wrecker doctors” and a lead article for
Pravda
on the same subject. The public was told of the discovery of “a terrorist group made up of doctors whose goal, using wrecking treatments, was to shorten the lives of the Soviet Union’s prominent figures.” These alleged crimes were being committed on orders from an international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization and U.S. and British intelligence services.
135
The Soviet people were urged to exercise vigilance toward enemies receiving support from the imperialist world.
The publication of these items, on 13 January 1953, launched a large-scale ideological campaign designed to inflame anti-Semitism and bring “vigilance” to a fevered pitch. There were widespread rumors of possible pogroms and the internal resettlement of Soviet Jews. In the decades that followed, these rumors evolved into assumptions that Stalin might have been planning show trials against the doctors and the removal of Jews from the European USSR to the Far East, as had been done to Caucasian peoples during the war. Recently opened archives, despite thorough searches, have revealed no direct or indirect evidence to support either assumption. Given that either show trials or a roundup of an entire ethnic group would have required tremendous logistical effort, the absence of any trace of evidence is persuasive.
136
And even the maniacal Stalin, who by now was truly ill, saw no need for a resettlement program or large-scale arrests. The Doctors’ Plot campaign was entirely sufficient to his purpose. Remaining within the realm of ideas rather than actions, it manipulated the public mood and fostered a psychology of war-readiness in the absence of any looming war, thereby distracting people from their daily hardships. The arrests of prominent doctors also forced Stalin’s comrades to live in a state of anxiety as they tried to guess what testimony would be beaten out of their physicians in the bowels of the Lubyanka. Like other similar acts of demonstrative violence, the Doctors’ Plot had a foreign-policy aspect. Some historians believe that Stalin viewed this new campaign of anti-Semitism as a means of putting pressure on his Western opponents, the United States in particular. He was using the implicit threat of anti-Semitic pogroms to extract concessions from Western leaders, who knew no other way to influence him.
137
Historians can debate whether calculation or mania played the greater role in Stalin’s final campaigns. In either case, his actions attest to a relentless striving to hold onto power until he reached the ultimate impediment: death. The final leg of the journey toward this impediment began on Saturday evening, 28 February 1953, when he invited his four currently closest comrades—Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev, and Bulganin—to his dacha for the last dinner gathering of his life. The following day his bodyguards found him paralyzed, and the agonizing over whether or not to summon members of the highly suspect medical profession began.
THE DICTATORSHIP COLLAPSES
A conference in the Kremlin, 2–5 March 1953, and the death of Stalin.
The arrival of the doctors on the morning of 2 March 1953 fundamentally changed the situation. The very fact that they had been summoned to Stalin’s dacha meant that the seriousness of his condition was officially recognized. The doctors confirmed the worst: a stroke had brought the
vozhd
to death’s door. For the first time in many decades, and completely unexpectedly, the USSR was faced with a transfer of power at the highest level.
Like Lenin, Stalin had not anointed a successor or created a legal mechanism for the orderly transfer of power. Instead he did everything he could to hinder the emergence of a successor and to instill a sense of political unworthiness in his associates. By concentrating high-level decision making in his own hands, he ensured that the other members of the Politburo were poorly informed and had little authority even over those areas for which they were immediately responsible. Driven by a thirst for power, political self-centeredness, and senile emotional instability, the Soviet dictator seemed to display an “Après moi le déluge” attitude toward the post-Stalinist future.
Thus one can only marvel at the ease with which Stalin’s heirs got through the critical period of the interregnum. There were a number of reasons why they could do so. One was that even during Stalin’s lifetime his comrades had developed a certain independence and the ability to work with one another. Each oversaw a particular component of the party-state apparat. It was not unusual for them to meet without Stalin to work on specific practical matters of government. One set of administrative entities that met quite regularly were the various executive and administrative bodies that came under the Council of Ministers. Officially, Stalin headed these bodies, but he never took part in their day-to-day work. Furthermore, during his lengthy southern vacations the Politburo grew accustomed to deliberating without him. Also, the members of the leadership were united by their common terror of the dictator. Although there was competition to get closer to him, Stalin’s comrades were careful not to provoke his fury, and they worked to maintain equilibrium within the leadership group. The Leningrad Affair had shown that no one was safe. There was an elaborate interplay among the instinct for self-preservation, institutional interests, and the need to fend off threats against the system. Dealing as they did with the day-to-day challenge of keeping the country afloat, Stalin’s colleagues were keenly aware of the urgent need for change to which he seemed willfully blind. This awareness led to an informal effort to conceive solutions, whose realization was blocked only by Stalin. Gradually and inexorably, under the shadow of dictatorship, the oligarchic system took embryonic form. It was only a matter of days from the first news of Stalin’s fatal illness that the oligarchy emerged as a force.
At 10:40 on the morning of 2 March, an official meeting of the Central Committee Presidium Bureau was convened. It was the first time in many years that a meeting took place in Stalin’s Kremlin office without him. In addition to all the members of the Bureau (except for Stalin), the attendees were Molotov, Mikoyan, Nikolai Shvernik (the chairman of the Supreme Soviet), Matvei Shkiriatov (chairman of the Party Control Commission), I. I. Kuperin (head of the Kremlin’s health administration), and the neuropathologist R. A. Tkachev. For twenty minutes the group considered one matter: “The finding of the council of physicians concerning the cerebral hemorrhage of Comrade I. V. Stalin that took place on 2 March and the resulting severe state of his health.”
1
The Bureau approved the doctors’ diagnosis and established a schedule for members of the leadership to keep watch by the
vozhd
’s bedside. The presence of Molotov and Mikoyan, despite their being out of favor with Stalin and formally expelled from the Bureau, is of central importance. Their inclusion was an act of defiance against the
vozhd
and an effort to restore the old collective leadership, as well as a natural and sensible step aimed at maintaining unity in a time of crisis. The Soviet leaders, certain that Stalin would not recover, were undertaking to change the system of supreme power that he had established.
At 8:25 that evening, the same assemblage of newly fledged oligarchs again convened in Stalin’s office to consider an official medical update: “On the state of health of Comrade I. V. Stalin as of the evening of 2 March.”
2
With every passing hour it became clearer: Stalin had not long to live. The doctor Aleksandr Miasnikov later recalled: “On the morning of the third the council of physicians had to submit an answer to Malenkov’s question about the prognosis. The only answer we could give was a negative one: death was inevitable. Malenkov gave us to understand that he expected such a finding, but then stated that he hoped that medical measures could extend his life for a sufficient time, even if they could not save it. We understood that he was referring to the need to allow time to organize a new government and, at the same time, prepare public opinion.”
3