Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

December 5: I warned Molotov on the telephone that the Foreign Commissariat’s press department was wrong to pass The Daily Herald’s reports from Moscow setting out all sorts of fantasies and slanderous thoughts about our government, about the relations between members of the government and about Stalin. Molotov answered me that he thought foreign correspondents ought to be treated more liberally. . . . Yet today I read a report . . . in The New York Times . . . in a still coarser form. . . .

December 6: I consider your telegram completely unsatisfactory. It is the result of the naïveté of three of you and the sleight of hand of the fourth, i.e., Molotov. . . . None of us had the right to decide on his own matters involving a change in our policy. But Molotov did usurp that right. Why, on what basis? Is it not because libelous slanders are part of his work plan? . . . I have become convinced that Molotov does not value very much the interests of our state and the prestige of our government as long as he can get popularity in certain foreign circles. I can no longer consider such a comrade to be my first deputy.²

Beria, Malenkov, and Mikoyan read the telegram aloud to Molotov. They reported: “We summoned Molotov . . . after some thought he said that he had made a whole pile of mistakes but thinks this mistrust unfair, there were tears in his eyes.”

Molotov had angered Stalin by failing to secure a Soviet veto in the allied consultative commission on the future of Japan; in London he had let France and China have a say in peace treaties with Germany’s allies. Molotov was banished to New York, as envoy “Mr. Nyet” to the United Nations. Mikoyan also incurred Stalin’s wrath for failing to report on the new harbors and rich fishing grounds of the newly acquired Kurile Islands.

In March 1946 the Supreme Soviet renamed commissariats ministries. Stalin told the Council of Ministers, “A people’s commissar . . . reflects a period of unstabilized system, the period of civil war, of revolutionary breakup etc., etc. . . . The war has proved our social system is very strong . . . it is appropriate to change from people’s commissar to minister. The people will understand this easily because there is a plague of commissars.”³

Whether commissar or minister, any pretext—rain falling after fine weather was forecast—sufficed for Stalin to abuse his underlings. These bouts of anger did not always have the fatal outcomes of 1937 or 1938 but they shook men once confident of their hold on power.

Malenkov was unseated. The pretext was a letter sent to Stalin by his surviving legitimate son, Vasili, a drunken hooligan promoted to air force commander. Other pilots had paid with their lives for telling Stalin that Soviet aircraft were “flying coffins”; Vasili, although his father detested him, spoke freely about the Yak-9 fighter and its crashes. Stalin knew that half the 80,000 Soviet aircraft lost in the war had crashed due to mechanical failure. Abakumov also fed Stalin statistics comparing the deadly exploits of the Luftwaffe with the Soviet air force’s failures. Stalin dismissed Aleksei Shakhurin, minister for the aviation industry, within days of his return to Moscow and in spring had Abakumov arrest him together with Marshal of Aviation Aleksandr Novikov. They spent seven years in jail.

A Politburo resolution on May 4, 1946, pointed at the real culprit:

To confirm that comrade Malenkov, as the boss of the aviation industry responsible for certifying aircraft and for the air force, is morally answerable for the appalling failings which have been uncovered in the work of these departments (producing and certifying substandard aircraft), that he, knowing of these appalling failings, failed to make the Central Committee aware of them.

To deem it essential that Malenkov be removed from the Secretariat of the Central Committee.⁴

In March Malenkov, hitherto at only forty-five the rival of Andrei Zhdanov as Stalin’s heir apparent, was packed off to Kazakhstan.⁵

Beria alone seemed safe. In 1946 he left his ministry in order to manage the atomic weapons project, but from the Politburo he still oversaw internal affairs. The minister, Sergei Kruglov, was an unimaginative, spasmodically brutal bureaucrat. His main tasks for Stalin were to develop the GULAG and build more canals with slave labor. On Stalin’s insistence he put 200,000 political prisoners into special camps to be worked to death in harsher conditions, their only consolation being that they were moved away from the common criminals who had raped, robbed, and murdered them.