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

Stalin had no use for the Jewish Antifascist Committee after the war; it was too closely connected with Zionism. Stalin held back in 1947, for in November the United Nations voted to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Stalin supported the founding of Israel, as although it depended on American capital and was a powerful magnet for Soviet Jews, many of Israel’s founding fathers had been born in the Russian empire and been members of socialist or communist movements and Stalin hoped to influence them. On May 18, 1948, within hours of the United States, the USSR recognized Israel. Soviet Jews were forbidden to migrate but Romania and Czechoslovakia happily met their own anti-Semites’ and Stalin’s demands by letting 10,000 Jews leave every month. This was one move by Stalin that enjoyed international approval.

In September 1948 the new Israeli ambassador, Golda Meir, arrived in Moscow. Meir knew no Russian, but her counselor Namir and her attaché Ratner did. Meir received an ovation at the Jewish theater in Moscow. Her visit to the synagogue drew a crowd that blocked nearby lanes and, worse, Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, whose robotic Stalinism had not extinguished all spontaneous emotion, suddenly addressed Golda Meir in Yiddish: “Ich bin a yiddische Tochter!” Other Soviet Jews were warier than Zhemchuzhina: Ilya Ehrenburg told Golda Meir he hated Russian Jews who only spoke English.

A year later Polina Zhemchuzhina was arrested—she and Molotov had divorced at Stalin’s suggestion a few days before. Stalin loathed Zhemchuzhina; as the closest living friend of Nadezhda Allilueva, she knew what had prompted her suicide. Molotov abstained from voting for her expulsion from the Central Committee but her career was over, and Molotov, despite apologizing for his abstention, lost the Foreign Ministry to Vyshinsky. By imprisoning Zhemchuzhina, Stalin pinioned Molotov as he had Kalinin. Kalinin’s Estonian wife had been tortured in 1938 and, despite his appeals in 1944, the wife of the head of state was still delousing shirts in the camp bathhouse as he lay dying.

The Soviet–Israeli idyll did not last long: communists won only four seats in the Israeli Knesset; the MAPAM party lobbied for the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate. Israel became a client state of the United States.

Palestine was not the only country mooted for the survivors of the Holocaust. Stalin had allowed Mikhoels and Fefer, during their wartime visit to America, to suggest the Crimea. In the 1920s and 1930s some $30 million had been contributed by Americans to aid Jewish settlers in the north Crimean steppes. Molotov was dubious: he thought Jews an urban people who “couldn’t be put on a tractor.” But Mikhoels pushed the idea, tactlessly telling Stalin that Soviet Jews needed a refuge from Russian anti-Semitism.

Like Erlich and Alter in 1941, the leaders of the Jewish Antifascist Committee had presumed too much. Stalin preferred a murderous solution to the aspirations of Soviet Jewry. To arrest Solomon Mikhoels, the committee’s president, would have made him a martyr, so Stalin would have Mikhoels killed, and Zionists would confess to murdering him for his loyalty to the USSR. Viktor Abakumov provided a pretext: under torture, I. I. Goldshtein, a friend of Svetlana’s first husband, confessed that Solomon Mikhoels was giving the Americans information on Stalin’s family. Abakumov was ordered to liquidate Mikhoels. Despondent at the arrest of friends and at a flood of abusive letters, Mikhoels told a leading actor that he sensed he would soon die. He went to Minsk with a friend, the critic Vladimir Golubov-Potapov, who also worked for the MGB. Three senior hangmen arranged the killing for January 13, 1948: Abakumov’s deputy Sergei Ogoltsov, Shubniakov of counterintelligence, and Beria’s crony Lavrenti Tsanava, head of the Belorussian MGB. Golubov-Potapov was instructed to get Mikhoels out of his hotel. The two were snatched and taken by car to Tsanava’s dacha. They were laid on a road, and a truck driven over them. The corpses were then dumped in the snow in a suburb of Minsk.

Civil police came from Moscow to certify accidental death. Rumors spread that right-wing Poles or fanatical Zionists had killed Mikhoels. Killers and victims were at first both honored: Tsanava, Shubniakov, and the MGB drivers got medals; Mikhoels an obituary in Pravda. Albert Einstein and Marc Chagall sent condolences. Polina Zhemchuzhina came to the funeral, Ehrenburg spoke, and Peretz Markish recited a poem ending, “Out of the ditches and stinking pits / Six million innocent tortured victims will arise to give you reverence.” Kaganovich’s niece came and warned Mikhoels’s relatives, “Never ask anyone anything.”