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

Less than a week after Stalin’s funeral, Beria set up four commissions to report to Kruglov, Kobulov, and Goglidze within two weeks. One commission acquitted the surviving Kremlin doctors, the second rehabilitated state security officers whom Riumin had brought down, the third liberated artillery officers purged by Stalin, the fourth freed the Mingrelians imprisoned or exiled by Rukhadze. Beria himself then rehabilitated Solomon Mikhoels. He was extraordinarily unvindictive: of Mikhoels’s murderers, only Ogoltsov and Tsanava suffered; Riumin was traced to his shack outside the Sevastopol post office, arrested, interviewed by Beria for fifty-five minutes and promised his life if he confessed everything, then handed over to Vlodzimirsky and Khvat. On March 24 he wrote to Beria, “When I have to die, regardless of why or in what circumstances, my last words will be: I am devoted to the party and its Central Committee! At the moment I believe in the wisdom of L. P. Beria . . . and hope my case will have a just outcome.” In a second interview with Beria Riumin was told, “You and I shan’t see each other again. We are liquidating you.” Riumin fell ill with despair, but then Beria forgot about him.

Others who had actually worked against Beria or whom he had undermined—General Vlasik, Rukhadze, who had engineered the Mingrelian arrests, Abakumov, and a handful of Abakumov’s most brutal interrogators—remained in prison, but they were left in peace. Beria interviewed Rukhadze in his office in March 1953, and Rukhadze groveled to Beria from the Lubianka:

I weep, I am in agony, I repent everything that has happened. I feel very, very sad. Please believe me, Lavrenti, that I had no hostile intent. The circumstances I was in, and my loneliness, had a big part in my sins. . . . I turn to you with a plea, as to my own father and tutor, and on my knees with tears in my eyes ask you to spare, forgive, and reprieve me. For my children’s sake let me have the chance of dying in freedom, after seeing them for the last time. You and only you, Lavrenti, can save me.³⁵

At first Beria had support from his closest ally, Malenkov, who in April drafted a speech deploring, without naming Stalin, the “personality cult” of Stalin’s last years. The party meeting was postponed and the speech never made.³⁶ The biggest shock came on March 26, when Beria sent a note to Malenkov proposing the world’s biggest amnesty: it would empty the GULAG of a million prisoners. Half, Beria pointed out, were there because of Stalin’s 1947 law prescribing long prison sentences for all kinds of theft. Everyone with sentences of under five years was to be freed and their slate wiped clean. Sentences over five years would be halved. All women who had children under ten or who were pregnant were to be freed, as were males over fifty or under eighteen. The Ministry of Justice had one month to come up with alternatives to prison for most crimes.

The motive was purely practical. As Beria pointed out, the judicial system was flooding the GULAG with 650,000 new prisoners every year. Political prisoners—some half a million, except for a very few with short sentences—would still serve their time.³⁷ Two months later Beria abolished the special sessions, the troikas of MVD, prosecutor, and party secretary that since 1934 had sentenced millions to deportation, imprisonment, or death. Beria washed his hands of the whole penal system and handed it to the Ministry of Justice except for the special prisons and camps that still held 220,000 of the political prisoners and war criminals.³⁸ Beria had, in theory, established the rule of law in the USSR but the irony is that he let the measures be called the Voroshilov Amnesty. Over 1,200,000 prisoners were in fact freed and nearly half a million prosecutions were aborted. By summer 1953 Russian cities were being plagued by amnestied thieves, muggers, and rapists, while political prisoners and their families went on suffering.