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

In spring 1948 Abakumov drew up for Stalin a list of Jewish activists, concentrating on those linked with the Jewish Antifascist Committee, and those designated British and American spies. The committee was officially dissolved in November, when Israel took a “hostile” stance toward the USSR. Abakumov searched the Jewish theater and “proved” that Mikhoels had been an American Zionist agent. Dozens were arrested and tortured with red-hot metal rods; some held out for months. One interrogator, Colonel M. T. Likhachiov, explained to his victims, “I’m going to wring your necks, otherwise I’ll get my head cut off.” Abakumov’s secretary V. I. Komarov later wrote to Stalin (when he and Abakumov were behind bars): “I especially hated Jewish nationalists and was merciless to them, for I saw them as the most dangerous and spiteful enemies.”

Polina Zhemchuzhina was abandoned to Abakumov’s mercies. He broke her by making two male officials confess in her presence that they had had group sex with her.¹⁷ Stalin had these statements read out at the Politburo in Molotov’s presence. Zhemchuzhina was then sent to Kazakhstan.

The Jewish antifascists were shown no mercy. Many were accused of crimes that became capital when in 1950 Stalin brought back the death penalty. The biologist Lina Shtern, who through her American brother had imported streptomycin to treat TB patients, was declared a spy, as was the famous biochemist Iakov Parnas, who died in his first week in prison. One academician, Nikolai Gamaleia, who was ninety and ready to die, courageously wrote to Stalin: “something very wrong in respect of Jews is happening in our country . . . Anti-Semitism now comes from persons occupying top positions in governing party organs. . . .”

The interrogations and torture dragged on, then abruptly stopped in 1949. Abakumov’s men had a more urgent purge of Leningrad’s party leaders to conduct. Half of the Jews were sentenced to the camps, but fifteen of the remainder were saved for a major trial, and their “leader,” Yitzhak Fefer, was in 1950 transferred to a new special prison, supervised by Malenkov and Shkiriatov, for dangerous political prisoners. The fifteen, when they finally came to trial, had the consolation that those who had arrested them were now held in the same prisons.

Vengeance on Leningrad

I not only detested pure words

And the strictures of higher judges,

I basked in flatterers’ hypocritical duplicity,

I encouraged slanderous intentions

And pronounced false condemnations.

I had no pity for widows’ tears

Nor for orphans’ inarticulate sobbing,

I did not clothe the loins of paupers . . .

King David of Georgia (the Builder), “Hymn of Penitence VII”

IN THE LATE 1940s Stalin’s entourage noted with alarm his weakened concentration each time he returned to Moscow from his three months’ autumn holiday. He now abandoned one project before starting another and new favorites were as liable as old colleagues to incur wrath and distrust. Stalin became more secretive, and set members of the Politburo against each other. Tired, he looked only at selected papers and suspected that facts were being hidden from him. He wrote very few notes; instructions, often ambiguous and contradictory, were conveyed by a few words or gestures during dinner and drinking bouts at Stalin’s dacha.

Stalin sensed ideological betrayal all around. One traitor was Professor Petre Sharia, secretary for propaganda in the Georgian party, who was editing and translating into Russian all Stalin’s Georgian prose. In 1943 Sharia’s twelve-year-old son, Dazmir, was killed by a car and the boy’s English teacher gave Sharia Tennyson to read for consolation. Under Tennyson’s influence Sharia wrote, in Russian, a poem which, the Politburo reported, “recognizes the immortality of the soul and the reality of life beyond the grave.” Worse, in 1948 Sharia let his deeply moved friends secretly print seventy-five copies on state printing presses. Sharia went to prison despite his defense that grief had driven even Karl Marx to throw himself into his first son’s grave.

When in August 1948 Andrei Zhdanov died of heart disease despite or because of the attention of several leading Kremlin doctors, Stalin reacted with strange equanimity. Zhdanov had looked after ideology and had kept Leningrad free of heresy, enduring the blockade, albeit in his well-supplied bunker. In the first weeks of the siege, however, Zhdanov had organized the defense of the city and an evacuation of civilians. Stalin had countermanded his plans, complaining in his telegrams of Leningrad behaving as if it were “an island in the Pacific,” not a part of the USSR. Moreover, after Zhdanov’s son became Stalin’s son-in-law, both father and son were suspected of intriguing against Stalin. In any case, with or without Zhdanov, Leningrad still seemed to Stalin, as in the 1930s, a nest of vipers.