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

Beria’s subordinates sensed his power ebbing and helped Ignatiev and Stalin undermine him. After Beria’s appointee Rapava fell, an eastern Georgian, General Nikolai Rukhadze, took over the Georgian MGB. He dined with Stalin at Sochi and was told to report direct. Rukhadze, like Riumin, disappointed Stalin: he boasted to his cronies of privileges but was uninventive. He alleged that Beria was Jewish but could not follow up Beria’s connections with Georgian émigrés in Paris. Nevertheless, a Politburo resolution of November 9, 1951, named a Gegechkori as the target of American intelligence. On March 27, 1952, another Politburo resolution did more damage: Kandid Charkviani, to whom Beria had entrusted the Georgian party, was replaced by another eastern Georgian, Akaki Mgeladze.²⁷ Apart from Beria only one other Mingrelian still retained power outside Georgia: Lavrenti Tsanava in Belorussia, the murderer of Mikhoels. He too was dismissed in June 1952. Lastly, Stalin threw out Beria’s sole ally in the Red Army, its chief of staff, General Sergei Shtemenko, who had with Beria held the Caucasian passes against the Germans. By June 1952 Beria was cowed. Thousands of Mingrelians were arrested and their language was banned from official use. Before 1952 Georgians had represented less than 1 percent of the population of the GULAG although they were 2 percent of the population of the USSR; the Mingrelian affair rectified this anomaly.²⁸

Rukhadze very quickly overreached himself: Stalin transferred Georgian state security to another candidate and brought Rukhadze to Moscow where “his fate will be decided.”²⁹

Beria’s fawning now grated on Stalin, but he was irreplaceable. Few others, certainly neither Riumin nor Rukhadze, met Stalin’s essential criteria: “clever, active, and strong.” Only Andrei Vyshinsky approached Beria in Stalin’s esteem. Since 1949 Vyshinsky had been no less intransigent and rather more eloquent a minister of foreign affairs than Molotov. Vyshinsky’s part in the judicial murders of the 1930s was notorious, but the disgust he inspired at international conferences was in Stalin’s eyes an asset. MGB men looked down on Vyshinsky as “the Menshevik,” but Vyshinsky was important enough for his Kremlin office, like Stalin’s, to have a telephone which let him monitor all calls in the complex.³⁰

Even Vyshinsky must have blanched when Stalin gave a rambling ninety-minute speech to the Central Committee on October 16, 1952. One by one, Stalin berated his closest associates in tones that had always presaged a fall. The unsinkable Mikoyan—“from one Ilyich [Lenin] to the other [Brezhnev] without heart attack or paralysis”—for once turned pale. Stalin damned Molotov: “What about Molotov’s offer to hand the Crimea to the Jews? . . . Comrade Molotov respects his spouse so much that hardly have we in the Politburo taken a decision on an important political question than it quickly becomes known to Comrade Zhemchuzhina. . . . Clearly such behavior by a member of the Politburo is impermissible.”

Even as Stalin railed in Moscow his puppets in Budapest, Prague, Bucharest, and Sofia were carrying out his instructions. Stalin had insisted on purges in eastern Europe partly because he was furious at the failure of the MGB to destroy Tito. Stalin had said, “I have only to move my little finger, and Tito is finished,” only to find Tito and his security minister Ranković more than a match for him. East European leaders who thought Stalin and Molotov too intransigent toward Tito—all but the Hungarians and Albanians were slow to follow Stalin’s line—were branded Titoist, Trotskyist, and Zionist. In Tirana, Enver Hoxha, supervised by an MGB officer, was the first to mete out a death sentence: in June 1949 Koci Xoxe, the Albanian Beria, was shot.

Władysław Gomułka, the Polish general secretary who had spent the war underground, was too soft. Stalin had Bierut remove Gomułka, who eventually accepted an invitation to see Stalin at Kuntsevo in December 1948 and managed to charm him. Gomułka kept his life and liberty, even though Stalin and Ogoltsov had forty state security men preparing a dossier.