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

On April 3, 1953, thirty-seven doctors were publicly rehabilitated; Ignatiev was disgraced and Lidia Timashuk lost her medal. Beria sent a secret memorandum to the Presidium with statements from Abakumov, Ogoltsov, and Tsanava admitting the murders of Mikhoels and his friend Golubov on Stalin’s orders. Lest the typist be shocked by the lèsemajesté, Beria inserted Stalin’s name by hand. Again, the killers had their medals taken away. On April 4, 1953, Beria prohibited torture. The chambers in Lefortovo prison were dismantled and all instruments destroyed; the poisons laboratory, however, remained. Four days later the Presidium received a long document from Beria expressing concern for his native Georgia. In consequence, the Mingrelians purged by Rukhadze and Stalin were rehabilitated, as were 11,000 unfortunate Georgian citizens who had been deprived of all their possessions and deported. This document too had Stalin’s name inserted by hand wherever the chain of responsibility led to the top. There were no revenge arrests; Akaki Mgeladze, whom Stalin had put in charge of the Georgian party, went to manage a tree nursery in northeastern Georgia. Beria made a rehabilitated Mingrelian, Aleksi Mirtskhulava, the Georgian party leader.

Beria brought back conventional economics: he told army generals the military was costing too much; he stopped work on gargantuan civil engineering projects—canals in the central Asian deserts, railways over Arctic permafrost—dear to Stalin’s heart, which drained the budget and took thousands of prisoners’ lives. The savings would be used to pay the peasants more, and charge consumers less for food.

In May, Beria surpassed even the amnesty when the May Day parade in Red Square took place without the usual giant portraits of the leaders. Was the age of idolatry over? Beria remarked that Canadians had no internal passports and proposed abolishing most restrictions on movement. All closed cities would now be open, except for three naval bases, and anyone gainfully employed would have the right to live in Moscow and Leningrad. Thanks to Beria, the inhabitants of 300 cities and the frontier zones rejoined the outside world.

Beria was driving the ship of state so fast its crew feared it would break up, and as if he knew that he had but little time, he gave orders that inevitably provoked mutiny. At the end of May he proposed handing power in the western Ukraine and Lithuania to officials native to the area. As a result, Ukrainians took charge of the local party, a move that won Beria popularity among Ukrainian writers and filmmakers, but not among the Russified party elite. In Lithuania all official proceedings, Beria insisted, had to be in Lithuanian, and Russian party secretaries who did not speak the local language had to go.³⁹ Belorussia and Latvia benefited in the same way.

Malenkov and Khrushchiov saw this as the wrecking of the USSR and Beria’s next straws broke the camel’s back. On June 2 he tabled measures “for creating a healthy political climate in the German Democratic Republic.” The GDR was in crisis. Riots took place as the East Germans saw West Germany overtake them and achieve prosperity, and in two years half a million people—including 3,000 party members and 8,000 police—had fled west. Beria proposed negotiating the reunification of a “democratic, peace-loving independent Germany” by letting German communists talk to West German social democrats. Private capital was to be allowed, cooperatives disbanded, harsh punitive measures abolished, and prisoners freed. The aim, Beria admitted, was to further “the peaceful settlement of international problems,” and he demonstrated this in Hungary by forcing Mátyás Rákosi to take on as his prime minister a Soviet agent, the gentler Imre Nagy. Beria also canceled Stalin’s plans to assassinate Tito and tried to mend relations with him. In the east, Beria urged the Chinese and North Koreans into peace talks to end the Korean War. He recalled all the MVD’s intelligence agents to Moscow, allowing back out only those who passed an examination in the language of the country where they were posted.