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

In summer 1949 Igor Kurchatov took a nickel hemisphere with a critical mass of plutonium to the Kremlin. Stalin stroked it and felt the heat. The Soviet bomb was tested in Kazakhstan at 7:00 a.m. on August 29, 1949, eleven years earlier than American experts had predicted. Beria’s euphoria was spoiled only by Stalin, who, woken at 4:00 a.m. in Moscow, responded “I already know” to the news. Kurchatov and Beria distributed dachas, cars, and fat bonuses to all those involved. According to Kurchatov, Beria had a notebook which listed each person’s punishment—from shooting to the camps—if the bomb failed: the rewards were calculated accordingly.

Crushing the Last of the Literati

THE LITERATI were unluckier than the physicists. Andrei Zhdanov was told to bring them to book. Zhdanov began with Leningrad, working closely under Stalin’s supervision. The propaganda apparatus of the Central Committee undertook literary criticism. They found war stories objectionable if the soldier heroes were downcast, poems deplorable if they lamented ruined cities. Humor was utterly beyond Zhdanov. Targeting the Leningrad journal Zvezda, he picked on one of the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko’s funniest stories, The Adventures of an Ape, and raged at the idea of an ape escaped from the zoo becoming an example for human beings.

On August 9, 1946, Stalin himself, with Zhdanov and a rehabilitated, chastened Malenkov, railed at Zvezda’s unfortunate editor, Vissarion Saianov, for printing a parody of the nineteenth-century civic poet Nekrasov. ⁸ A parody, said Stalin, was “a trick, the author is hiding behind someone.” Stories like Zoshchenko’s, said Stalin—even though he had read him to his daughter Svetlana—proved that the editors were “tiptoeing after foreign writers . . . encouraging servile feelings.” Others, notably the playwright Vsevolod Vishnevsky, joined the attack: Zoshchenko’s autobiographical tale Before Sunrise, Vishnevsky told Stalin, was “undressing down to his dirty underwear,” Zoshchenko’s heroes were “drunks, cripples, invalids.” Stalin damned Zoshchenko as “the preacher of non-ideology,” his stories as “malevolent rant.” Anna Akhmatova was called by Stalin “nothing but an old name.” One editor stood up for Akhmatova, saying that if rejected by Zvezda she would be printed in Znamia, to which Stalin retorted, “We’ll get round to Znamia too, we’ll get round to the lot of them.” Finally, Stalin conceded that there were “diamonds mixed with the dung” but the Akhmatova and Zoshchenko cult was blamed on Leningrad’s unsound ideology. The journals were put under new editorship; Akhmatova, one of Russia’s two greatest living poets, and Zoshchenko, its best short-story writer, were outlawed. The next day the MGB denounced Zoshchenko’s “anti-Soviet” views, his doubts about victory, his remark that “Soviet literature is now a pathetic spectacle,” and his bad influence. Zoshchenko was not however arrested; possibly he was saved by writing an emotional but dignified defense to Stalin.

Also on August 9 Stalin made a speech to the party’s Orgburo on the films he had seen. Scenes that showed homeless coal miners after the war should be thrown out of films. He compared Russian scriptwriters unfavorably to Charlie Chaplin.⁹ Soviet poets were lazy compared to Goethe who had worked for thirty years at Faust (Faust was always a literary benchmark for Stalin). He disliked the second part of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible with its remorseful Tsar and its carousing secret police whom Eisenstein had depicted as “the lowest mangy rabble, as degenerates, something like the American Ku Klux Klan.”

Stalin’s rant signaled a crackdown: the ninety-volume edition of Tolstoi which had been coming out since 1928 was shortened, Tolstoi’s Christianity neutralized by Leninist prefaces. The novelist Fadeev, complicit in the execution of so many writers in 1937–8, was made general secretary of the Union of Writers. Access to foreign literature was strictly limited to those who Stalin felt had a need to see corrupting matter.