Stalin: A Biography

Yevdokimov returned to his apartment exhausted. Probably he had worked out that the authorities wanted to arrest doctors of Jewish origin. Most victims had surnames appearing to indicate they were Jews. ‘Rootless cosmopolitanism’ was routinely denounced with rising intensity. Jews across the Soviet Union were persecuted. They were sacked from positions of responsibility. They were vilified at work. Anti-semitic jibes on the streets became common and no one was called to account. It required courage for anyone to defend the victims. The campaign, which was never officially designated as being aimed at Jewish citizens, gathered force. Many leading Jews were taken into police custody. Solomon Mikhoels, a leader of the USSR’s Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (formed in the Second World War), was killed in a car crash on Stalin’s orders in 1948; the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was disbanded and the rest of its leadership was arrested and shot.³¹ But Molotov’s wife Polina Zhemchuzhina, who had been in detention and exile since 1949, was still alive. She was picked as a Jew who might be put at the centre of a forthcoming show trial. Security police resumed their interrogation of her. Rumours grew that measures were being prepared to deport all Soviet Jews to the Jewish Autonomous Region set up in Birobidzhan in eastern Siberia in 1928 (when Stalin and the Politburo had at last come to the conclusion that those Jews of the USSR who wished to retain their ancestral culture should have a territory of their own).

Whether Stalin really intended the universal deportation of Jews in the early 1950s remains unknown, though this is widely treated as a fact; and no conclusive proof has come to light.³² Yet the situation was developing fast. No Jew in the USSR could feel safe. The presentiment of pogroms grew. Kaganovich, being of Jewish ancestry, felt edgy. Perhaps Stalin would have spared him from implication in the Doctors’ Plot. But the precedents were not encouraging. Once purges started, there was no telling where they might end. Already Molotov and Mikoyan had been cast down from on high. With Zhemchuzhina in prison, Molotov had long feared the worst. Both Molotov and Mikoyan had been removed from their leading posts even though they remained Politburo members. But the writing was on the wall for them. Favour, once withdrawn, was seldom given again.

When he came to finalising arrangements for the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952, Stalin had surprises in store. A Central Committee plenum was held in August. This gave him the chance to take the measure of the entire party and governmental leadership, and he did not fail to encourage individuals to criticise each other’s draft directives before they were passed to the Congress. This was also an opportunity for rising young leaders to catch his eye. Among them was Mikhail Pervukhin, already Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Two weeks later Stalin phoned him early on Sunday morning. He asked Pervukhin why he had proposed amendments to the directives at the Central Committee plenum rather than at the Council of Ministers. Pervukhin explained that he felt obstructed by the fact that the directives had already been decided in the Bureau of the Council of Ministers. To Stalin this smelled like conspiracy, especially when he learned that Beria, Malenkov and Bulganin took it in turns to chair the Bureau. Always he sought to break up coalitions among his subordinates. Malenkov and Bulganin remained in his good books but Stalin left nothing to chance. On his instructions the outspoken Pervukhin was promoted to membership of the Bureau.³³

Stalin then asked the chastened Malenkov to deliver the Central Committee’s political report. He himself was too frail. Not since 1925 had anyone but Stalin discharged this task. When Kaganovich asked him about this, Stalin artfully replied that he needed to ‘promote the young’.³⁴ This, too, was scarcely good news for Kaganovich; but it was worse for Molotov and Mikoyan. At the meeting to plan the proceedings, Stalin proposed excluding them from the Congress Presidium as being ‘non-active members of the Politburo’. When listeners took this as a joke, Stalin insisted that he meant what he said.³⁵ At the Congress itself Stalin said little, contenting himself with pleasing his audience by sitting in a prominent place on the platform. Policies already in place were confirmed by the eulogies of speakers. Yet divergences in the Politburo were detectable to the ears of the better-informed delegates. Malenkov spoke for light industry, Beria for the non-Russians and Khrushchëv for agriculture. All this was done in Aesopian language. On the surface it was made to seem that Stalin and the Politburo were as close in their opinions as two coats of paint.