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

Rumors of a massive pogrom raged among Moscow’s anti-Semites, Jews, and diplomats. In the MGB Goglidze collected these rumors: after the doctors had been hanged in Red Square, 400,000 Jews would be deported to Siberia to “save” them from the people’s wrath; cattle wagons were ready in Moscow’s railway marshaling yards. There was no basis for any of this: the railway archives show no deportation preparations, and even a senile Stalin would have forbidden anything as spontaneous as a pogrom. However, a letter to Pravda was prepared, and sixty prominent Jews were told to sign it—they included the physicist Lev Landau, the poet Samuil Marshak, the novelist Vasili Grossman, and the film director Mikhail Romm. The signatories demanded the eradication of “Jewish bourgeois nationalists” and “spies and enemies of the Russian people.” Kaganovich chose to sign a separate version of the letter. Ilya Ehrenburg signed only after writing to Stalin to warn him that the letter might “confuse people who are not yet aware that there is no Jewish nation.”²⁵

Seven weeks before his fatal stroke Stalin lost interest in the whole fabrication, and it fell apart before he was declared dead on March 5. Most of the doctors were lucky: two died under torture, but the others, physically and psychologically traumatized, were released a few weeks later by Beria. None of Stalin’s heirs was in such good health that they could afford to alienate the country’s leading medical consultants.

The Jewish antifascists were less fortunate: their interrogators such as P. I. Grishaev, a polyglot lawyer, were fresh from the Nuremberg trials. Some were beaten to death by the “choppers” while Grishaev wrote up his doctoral dissertation; others were executed by Abakumov in November 1950.²⁶ The rest were saved for trial, and Yitzhak Fefer was even produced in the Hotel Metropol when the American singer Paul Robe-son came to Moscow and asked to see him. Fourteen, including Fefer, Peretz Markish, and Academician Lina Shtern, survived long enough to be tried in secret, with neither defense nor prosecutor but with “expert” witnesses and at surprising length—from July 11 to 18, 1952. The trial was held in the secret-police club room inside the Lubianka. The judge, Cheptsov, later claimed to have had doubts about his verdicts, which he attributed to Abakumov’s, Riumin’s, and Grishaev’s incompetence rather than the defendants’ innocence. Fefer acted as bellwether; others spoke defiantly, but all were shot except Lina Shtern, the sole survivor to tell the tale.

Even Beria’s power seemed to be waning. After 1949, when the atom bomb had been tested and Soviet physicists were at work on the world’s first hydrogen bomb, Beria had time to spend in Stalin’s company at the Kuntsevo dacha and in Sochi. However, as Stalin aged, his nocturnal meetings became shorter and he now rarely saw Beria without Malenkov, Mikoyan, or Molotov. Stalin told Beria to replace the Georgian household staff at his dacha with Russians. In autumn 1951, while on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus, Stalin brought a party commission to Georgia to arrest Beria’s Mingrelians in the party for bribery and nationalism. Worse for Beria was the next wave of arrests: Gegechkoris—relatives of Beria’s wife—and at least one of his mistresses were caught in the net. Teimuraz Shavdia, a son of the family which had brought up Nina Beria-Gegechkori, was sentenced to twenty-five years in the GULAG. Shavdia had deserted from the Red Army and fought with the Nazi SS before joining the French Maquis; inexplicably, he had been living openly in Tbilisi.