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

The key piece of evidence was a letter from Lidia Timashuk, a cardiologist in the Kremlin hospital. In 1948 she had administered the dying Andrei Zhdanov’s cardiograms and ordered him to stay in bed. She was overruled by Stalin’s doctor, Professor Vladimir Nikitich Vinogradov, who told Zhdanov to go for walks, even to the movies. The cardiograms prove Timashuk right.²¹ On August 30 a heart attack killed Zhdanov. Timashuk had long been an MGB informer but the letter she wrote, with her minority diagnosis, was meant to cover her back, not damn the Kremlin professors. The professors’ postmortem report confirmed their diagnosis, and they did what they could to silence Timashuk. ²² Timashuk’s letter was set aside not by Abakumov, but by Stalin, who read it and sent it to his own archive.

Abakumov, like Ezhov before him, found himself friendless. Beria, Malenkov, Ignatiev, and Shkiriatov all signed a warrant for his arrest on July 12, 1951. Ignatiev took over the MGB, with Riumin, now a colonel, as his deputy. Abakumov became “No. 15” in the special prison; his wife, a baby at her breast, was in another Moscow prison. Like Ezhov’s first wife, Abakumov’s previous wife was lucky to have been deserted: she was evicted from her apartment but not arrested. The purge in the MGB struck at a handful of Abakumov’s colleagues: Lev Aronovich Shvartsman, as a Jew, was doomed; Naum Eitingon, despite Stalin’s promise and thanks for killing Trotsky, was also arrested.

Abakumov’s torments were to last for three and a half years. When given pen and paper, he wrote to Stalin, neither groveling nor remonstrating, but Stalin then ordered full sets of interrogation records for himself, Beria, and Malenkov every ten days. Egged on by Riumin, three interrogators worked with rawhide whips to generate enough material to keep Stalin happy. Chekisty like Abakumov, as Stalin reminded his henchmen, needed extra beating to break them. Abakumov and his underlings were first made to confess to beating their own prisoners. Abakumov was put into leg-irons and handcuffed; he had no cell mates; he was hungry and cold. On April 18, 1952, Abakumov appealed to Beria and Malenkov: “Dear L. P. and G. M. . . . I’ve never ever seen such bestiality and I didn’t even know there were such refrigerated cells in Lefortovo, I was misled. . . . This stone sack can kill, cripple, or cause terrible illness. . . . I kept asking who authorized such nasty tricks to be played on me. . . . I realized that it was Riumin.”

Lev Shvartsman, who had previously composed statements for incoherent victims of torture to sign, now went mad—or simulated madness. Sent for more interrogation, Shvartsman then took another tack: he confessed that he was the leader of the Jewish nationalists, that he had sodomized Abakumov, the British ambassador, and his own son, as well as slept with his daughter. This time he was certified insane.

Riumin worked slowly, too slowly for Ignatiev’s composure or Stalin’s pleasure. However dim, Riumin knew that once the case was over, he would be disposable; he was in no hurry to conclude interrogations. He took a year to extract statements that Abakumov had framed the aviation minister in order to embarrass Malenkov, that he was in league with the Leningrad renegades whom he had sent to their deaths, that he was planning a coup d’état. All Riumin lacked was proof that Abakumov was a Jew. By April 1952, Abakumov, still refusing to confess, was a cripple and Riumin risked killing him if torture continued. Riumin nevertheless indicted him on November 3, 1952, as the leader of the MGB’s Jewish nationalists. Eleven days later, Stalin, after angrily penciling comments on Abakumov’s halfhearted confessions, dismissed Riumin and sent him to join the other failed state security ministers among the accountants at the Ministry of State Control.

It was now Ignatiev’s chance to shine, but he preferred his desk to visiting the Lubianka. Stalin roared at him, “You want to keep your hands clean, do you? You can’t. Have you forgotten Lenin ordered Fanny Kaplan to be shot? And said Savinkov had to be annihilated. If you’re going to be squeamish, I’ll smash your face in. If you don’t do what I tell you you’ll be in a cell next to Abakumov’s.”²³ Ignatiev had a heart attack. When he recovered, he moved Abakumov to Butyrki prison, to a cell surrounded by five empty cells. A guard and a doctor watched Abakumov, who was beaten a little less violently than the Jewish doctors and the recalcitrant MGB officers.

Yet more astonishing arrests were made: General Vlasik, Stalin’s confidant, chief bodyguard, and tutor to his children, had been dismissed in spring 1952 for squirreling away dinner plates and caviar, and carousing with loose women. He was arrested in the autumn. Not even a dog could have been more devoted than Vlasik. Was Stalin demented? And, if so, could Beria and Malenkov now seize power?

Stalin’s End