Stalin

The Murderous Career of the Red Tsar

Nigel Cawthorne

• Publisher: Arcturus
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781848589513
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

'Death is the solution to all problems. No man - no problem.'
Joseph StalinWorshipped by the Russians as a great leader, Stalin was one of modern history's greatest tyrants, rivalling Hitler, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot. But he probably had more blood on his hands than any of them.Born Josef Dzhugashvili in Gori, Georgia in 1879, Stalin studied to be a priest while secretly reading the works of Karl Marx. Politics soon became his religion and, under his ruthless rule, up to 60 million people perished.Peasants who resisted Stalin's policy of collectivisation were denounced as Kulaks, arrested and shot, exiled or worked to death in his ever-expanding network of concentration camps, the Gulag. Nobody was safe, not even his friends, his family or his political allies. This is the story of a man who never let up for a second in his pursuit of absolute power.

Chapter One

The Tyrant is Dead

Stalin ruled over the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics for nearly 30 years. He had been responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million people, he had deported another 28 million and he had enslaved 18 million individuals in labour camps, yet some of those who gathered around his bedside were still true believers. Others feared for their lives.

One of Stalin’s last crimes backfired on him and hastened his death. For years the Soviet press, at his behest, had been making constant references to the Jews who lived in the Soviet Union. They were being dismissed from their posts, arrested and executed. The Jews were seen as a ‘Fifth Column’ – that is, a minority group that might prove disloyal to the USSR. Less than eight years after the death of Hitler and the public exposure of the murderous extent of the Holocaust, Stalin planned to round up all of the Jews that remained in the Soviet Union – many of them survivors of the Nazi death camps – and then transport them to Siberia in cattle cars, where two new concentration camps had been built for the purpose. An engineer saw one of these camps in the 1960s. He described ‘row after row of barracks’ that had never been used.

‘Its vastness took my breath away,’ he said.

The Doctors’ Plot

Seventy-three-year-old Stalin had long mistrusted Jews, so he intended to rid his vast empire of them, thereby succeeding where Hitler had failed. He also mistrusted doctors. In 1927 Stalin consulted the world-renowned psychologist Vladimir Bekhterev, a rival of Pavlov. He was depressed after a power struggle with Leon Trotsky, a Jew. The good doctor concluded that Stalin was suffering from ‘grave paranoia’, a mental illness, which was a little unwise because he died immediately afterwards – poisoned on Stalin’s orders – and Stalin then had his name removed from the textbooks.

Under the last tsar Jews had not been allowed to own land or pursue certain careers. However, they were permitted to become doctors, so a disproportionate number of them had joined the medical profession. This gave Stalin an opening. His plan was to stage one of his famous show trials.

On 13 January 1953, the daily newspaper Pravda (Truth) announced that nine of the Kremlin’s top doctors had been arrested for murdering two of Stalin’s closest aides some years earlier. In an article called ‘Ignoble Spies and Killers under the Mask of Professor Doctors’, they were accused of taking part in a vast plot orchestrated by Western imperialists and Zionists. Their supposed aim was the elimination of leading Soviet political and military leaders. They were tortured in order to wring confessions from them.

Meanwhile, there would be a propaganda offensive. A million copies of a pamphlet called ‘Why Jews Must Be Resettled from the Industrial Regions of the Country’ had been prepared for distribution. A number of leading Jews had also been browbeaten into signing a statement asking for Jews to be deported ‘for their own good’, which would be published in Pravda. The text read:

‘We appeal to the government of the USSR, and to Comrade Stalin personally, to save the Jewish population from possible violence in the wake of the revelations about the doctor-poisoners and the involvement of renegade Soviet citizens of Jewish origin, who were caught red-handed in an American-Zionist plot to destabilize the Soviet government. We join with the Soviet peoples in applauding the punishment of the murdering doctors, whose crimes called for the highest measure. The Soviet people are naturally outraged by the ever-widening circle of treason and treachery and the fact that, to our sorrow, many Jews have helped our enemies form a fifth column in our midst. Simple, misguided citizens may be driven to striking back indiscriminately at Jews. For this reason, we implore you to protect the Jewish people by dispatching them to the developing territories in the East, where they will be employed in useful national labour and escape the understandably indignant anger prompted by the traitor-doctors. We, as leading figures among loyal Soviet Jewry, totally reject American and Zionist propaganda claiming that there is anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union…’

‘Open letters’ were a popular means of persecution in Stalin’s Russia. Children had even used them to denounce their parents as ‘socially harmful elements’, thereby condemning them to the frozen wastelands of Siberia.

One of the signatories of the Jewish letter was quickly sacked from the staff of Pravda after a colleague said he could no longer work with anyone who belonged to a race of poisoners and traitors. The Jews began burning their Yiddish books and avoided going out as much as possible, while some committed suicide in anticipation of what was to come. At a small synagogue in Georgia, just a few hundred metres from Stalin’s birthplace, the Torah was removed from the Ark so that it could be hidden.

In 1948 and 1949 Stalin had already caused large numbers of Jews to be deported to central Siberia, but this time a worse fate awaited Soviet Jewry. According to Louis Rapoport, author of Stalin’s War Against the Jews, the doctors were to be convicted and then hanged publicly in Red Square – at a time that would be symbolically close to Easter. Then ‘incidents’ would follow. The secret police would orchestrate attacks on the Jews and the statement begging Stalin for their deportation would be published. A further flood of letters would demand that action be taken.

According to Rapoport,

‘A three-stage programme of genocide would be followed. First, almost all Soviet Jews… would be shipped to camps east of the Urals… Second, the authorities would set Jewish leaders at all levels against one another, spying on each other and engaging in provocations. Also the MGB [secret police] would start killing the elites in the camps, just as they had killed the Yiddish writers and intellectuals in August of the previous year. The third and final stage would be to “get rid of the rest”.’

Polina Semyonovna Molotova (1897–1970)

The daughter of a Jewish tailor in Ukraine, Polina Karpovskaya joined the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Bolsheviks in 1918. During the Russian Civil War (1918–21), she served as a propaganda commissar in the Red Army. As a Communist she took the revolutionary name Zhemchuzhina, which is Russian for ‘pearl’.

In 1921, she married Vyacheslav Molotov, who was by then a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. She had a successful career in the Soviet administration and was elected a candidate to the Central Committee in 1939.

Stalin began to mistrust Polina when her sister emigrated to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine in the 1920s. Nevertheless the Molotovs and the Stalins shared an apartment and Polina became a close friend of Stalin’s second wife Nadezhda.

Polina tried to comfort Nadezhda after she had been publicly rebuked by Stalin during a dinner party in 1932, but Stalin’s wife mysteriously died the same night.

During a secret meeting of the Politburo in 1939, Stalin alleged that Polina had ‘connections to spies’. She was reprimanded, although no evidence could be found against her, and in 1941 her name was removed from the list of candidates to the Central Committee. After that she actively supported the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during the war against Hitler. In November 1948 she befriended Golda Meir, later prime minister of Israel, who was the first Israeli ambassador to Moscow. A month later Polina was arrested, charged with treason, forced to divorce Molotov and sentenced to five years in a labour camp. While she was away Molotov did not dare ask whether she was alive or dead.

After being released from the Gulag so that she could appear as a witness in the doctors’ trial, she asked: ‘How’s Stalin?’ On being told that he had just died, she fainted. She was reunited with Molotov and lived with him as an unrepentant Stalinist until she died of natural causes in 1970.

The Soviet camps would not need to be turned into efficient Nazi-style death factories, but that was only because the mortality rate in Stalin’s camps was so appallingly high that the ‘Jewish problem’ would be solved by attrition.

In preparation for the show trial, Stalin read the daily reports on the interrogation of the tortured doctors sent to him by Semyon Ignatiev, head of the MGB (Ministry of State Security). And he ordered the return of Object 12 – Polina Molotova – the former wife of Stalin’s foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Although she had been a loyal Communist since 1918, Stalin had never trusted her because she was Jewish and he frequently suggested that Molotov should divorce her. In 1948 she was convicted of treason on trumped-up charges and sentenced to five years in a labour camp, but that did not prevent her from being an unrepentant Stalinist. Now she was to be groomed to appear as the star witness in the doctors’ trial.

Stalin was also moving against his ruthless security chief Lavrenty Beria on the grounds that he had demonstrated a certain lack of vigilance by allowing traitorous doctors to work in the Kremlin. The Red Tsar did not trust Beria because he was a Mingrelian, an ethnic minority in Stalin’s native Georgia. Beria’s Georgian allies were arrested, along with a former mistress, while his protégés in Moscow were sacked. Beria responded by being disrespectful to Stalin, though he ‘expected the death-blow… any minute’, according to his son.

On 7 February 1953 Stalin met the Argentine Ambassador Leopold Bravo and asked him about Eva Peron, who had died the previous July. He could not have imagined that within a month he would be dead himself. Then on 17 February he dined with Beria so that he could force him to sign an order attacking the MGB, a move that was designed to rob Beria of allies. He also ordered another assassination attempt on President Tito of Yugoslavia.

Stalin went alone to see the Bolshoi Ballet on 27 February, leaving early. The following morning he read the latest interrogation reports on the Jewish doctors and saw an account of the war in Korea, which was then raging. It seems that he took a steam bath to ease his arthritis, a course of action that his doctors had advised him against. But he had no reason to listen to them now. After watching a film and drinking some Georgian wine, he was driven out to his dacha at Kuntsevo on the outskirts of Moscow. Over dinner his minister of defence, Nikolay Bulganin, briefed him on the stalemate in Korea. Stalin advised the Chinese and the North Koreans to negotiate. Then the conversation turned to the interrogation of the Jewish doctors under chief torturer Semyon Ignatiev, head of the MGB.

Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria (1899–1953)

A Mingrelian-Georgian who was born in Azerbaijan, Beria joined the Bolsheviks in March 1917, immediately before the February Revolution. In 1921, he joined the Soviet secret police, the Cheka, who defeated the rival Mensheviks and allowed the Bolsheviks to take over in Georgia and the Transcaucasus. With Stalin’s support, Beria then rose to become head of the Georgian Communist Party.

In 1935, Beria published a lengthy treatise called On the History of the Bolshevik Organizations in Transcaucasia, in which he emphasized Stalin’s role in the region’s revolutionary movement. Then in August 1938 Stalin brought him to Moscow, where he became the deputy head of the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). His chief, the murderous Nikolay Yezhov, was the acclaimed administrator of Stalin’s purges, but his position crumbled when Stalin realized the purges were damaging the infrastructure of the Soviet Union and the Party. After taking the blame for the excesses, the unfortunate Yezhov was removed from his position and executed, after which Beria succeeded him. Beria began by purging the secret police and ingratiating himself with Stalin, who praised him by declaring, ‘Beria is our Himmler’.

Beria became a candidate member of the Politburo in March 1939 and he was made a Commissar General of State Security in 1941. In his capacity as head of the MVD he recommended the murder of some 22,000 Polish officers, who were killed in the Katyn Forest in 1940. Then following Stalin’s orders he carried out a purge of the Red Army and the war industries in 1942. The Gulags under his direction were a major source of raw materials and slave labour, so he was able to take control of armaments production.

After the Germans had been driven from Soviet soil, Beria was put in charge of the deportation of the ethnic minorities, who had been accused of collaborating with the enemy. His organizational abilities were then put to use in a different field. Using agents in the United States and elsewhere, he supervised the building of the Soviet atomic bomb, which entailed slave l...