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

Beria lost his subservient, urbane minister for state security, Vsevolod Merkulov; Stalin wanted a more forceful minister. Viktor Abakumov came from SMERSH and reported direct to Stalin. Beria and Abakumov had no time for each other. Abakumov brought with him to the Ministry of State Security (MGB) two SMERSH generals, although Beria’s position in the Politburo left him with a little leverage over Abakumov, who retained several of Beria’s henchmen. One was Sergei Ogoltsov, who had cannily declined to be minister on the grounds of “lack of knowledge and experience”—disingenuous considering that he had joined the Cheka at the age of eighteen, had terrorized the Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and in winter 1941–2, under siege in Leningrad, had shot thirty-two prominent academics as “counterrevolutionaries.” Abakumov, like Beria, stood by his staff however much he abused them verbally; he even kept on the NKVD’s token Latvian, Eglitis, as well as two Georgian satraps of Beria’s, Goglidze in the Far East and Tsanava in Belorussia. In Georgia, however, he got rid of Beria’s nominee Rapava.

Beria took the atomic bomb project over from Molotov, who had failed to organize even a supply of uranium. Until Hiroshima, Stalin had paid little attention to his physicists’ warnings of the Allies’ and Germans’ progress. Now Stalin gave Beria first call on all resources as long as he got a bomb. If Beria failed, he would undoubtedly be shot.

In the event, Beria’s four years’ managing atomic weaponry were impressive. He seemed to get as much enjoyment from engineering projects as from arresting and killing enemies of the state. The atmosphere in which Soviet physicists and engineers worked was electric, and rather more luxurious than Los Alamos. This was Stalin’s one project where almost nobody was arrested and where all deadlines were met.⁶ There were many unnamed victims: thousands died mining uranium. More prisoners built laboratories, villas, garages, railway lines, even whole cities. Tens of thousands—three generations—of Kazakhs were condemned to death and radiation sickness when the bomb was tested in 1949. For once, however, the scientific community in the USSR felt valued.

The Soviet atomic bomb was built from information provided by Western scientists—some because they were communists, some believing that world peace would be secured by both sides in the cold war possessing nuclear deterrents, a few for mercenary reasons. Beria and NKVD men like Sudoplatov took the credit; Soviet foreign intelligence had revived in the ten years since Ezhov had annihilated it. The NKVD learned nuclear physics from Klaus Fuchs, metallurgy from Melita Nor-wood. Germany was scoured for scientists, students of Werner Heisenberg, who could enrich uranium and produce heavy water, and for the engineers who had built the V-2 rockets that would develop into intercontinental ballistic missiles. Physicists were retrieved from the GULAG and POW camps to be well fed and housed on the Black Sea.

First Beria located his uranium. In June 1946 Ivan Serov and another close associate, General Mikhail Maltsev, founded a company called Bismuth staffed by MGB troops. It took over twenty-seven sites in Upper Saxony and by October they were mining uranium from the old silver and lead mines. More uranium came from the Urals and the Russian Arctic.

Next Beria assembled his personnel. General Boris Vannikov, who had been tortured and then released in the first months of the war, maintained discipline; he clumsily bullied the physicists with a loaded revolver on his desk. Pavel Meshik, an old hand of Beria’s, came fresh from SMERSH and the subjugation of Poland. He ensured hermetic secrecy around a project employing 100,000 persons. Beria kept constant watch, traveling the length and breadth of the USSR in a specially adapted train to dozens of sites in Siberia, the Urals, the Caucasus, and Kazakhstan. Physicists were rewarded with a freedom to publish rivaled only by the Orthodox Church.⁷

The physicist who adapted Western information to Soviet resources was Igor Kurchatov. Piotr Kapitsa, used to working for the tactful Lord Rutherford, would not be bossed by Beria. In November 1945 he complained to Stalin: “Comrade Beria’s weakness is that a conductor has not only to wave his baton around, he has to understand the score. That’s where he’s no good . . . marking proposed resolutions with a pencil in his chairman’s armchair does not amount to managing a problem.” Kapitsa urged Stalin to let the physicists run the project themselves: “scientists are the leading force, not the subordinates in this business.” After Beria visited him in person Kapitsa withdrew from the project, and when Beria demanded his arrest, Stalin replied, “You’re not to touch him.” Kapitsa spent seven years working in his own laboratory at his dacha.