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

The next day self-pity turned to panic: “Dear comrades,” Beria wrote, “they are going to get rid of me without trial or investigation, after five days’ incarceration, without one interrogation, I beg you not to allow this, to intervene immediately, or it will be too late. You have to get in first by telephone.” He asked for his case to be investigated by a commission. “Dear comrades, surely executing a member of the Central Committee, and your comrade, in a cellar after five days in prison is not the only correct way of deciding and clarifying a case without a trial. . . . I beg Comrades Malenkov and Khrushchiov not to be stubborn would it really be bad if a comrade was rehabilitated?”

Beria was given no more paper. Khrushchiov chose a new chief prosecutor, the young and eager Roman Rudenko who had shone at Nuremberg, as the previous prosecutor Grigori Safonov had queried Beria’s arrest, which had been carried out by army officers with no warrant. On July 2 a plenary Central Committee meeting began. For six days several hundred men and two women, a handful of whom had suffered at Beria’s hands and many of whom owed their careers to him, listened, baying like hounds, to denunciations and disavowals. The participants all spoke so basely that the records of the meeting had to be falsified.⁴² There had been less moral turpitude in the terrifying plenum of spring 1938 which condemned Bukharin and Iagoda.

Khrushchiov admitted that the doctors’ plot and the Mingrelian affair had been fabrications—not that his audience thought that they should be put right. Khrushchiov implied that Beria only reprieved people who then became his agents. His preamble then degenerated into the incoherence that overcame most speakers. Beria, it turned out, had caused shortages of bread and meat; he did not care about the workers, which was why they lived in dugouts. His rehabilitation of the doctors was pure self-publicity; he had amnestied half the GULAG to build up a fief of thieves and murderers loyal to him. He was a man “of Bonaparte spirit ready to cross mountains of corpses and rivers of blood” for power.

Georgian leaders were bitter: rehabilitated Mingrelians, they complained, were now demanding ministerial posts. Beria’s crony in Azerbaijan Bagirov was so spiteful—he was to share Beria’s fate—that for once the audience turned on a speaker. Molotov and Kaganovich came better prepared. They portrayed Beria as a man who had misled and corrupted Stalin, frustrated economic planning and put the state at risk to please capitalists; he had probably been a fascist plant since 1920. Others thought up new accusations: Beria had engineered the fatal quarrel between Stalin and Orjonikidze and the estrangement between Stalin and Molotov. Beria, said Andrei Andreevich Andreev, who had left his sickbed for the meeting, was a second Tito—this perhaps the most perceptive of all accusations. Beria, complained others, visited them in their nightmares.

Malenkov in his summing-up tacitly conceded that Beria was right—there had been a personality cult of an elderly dictator who had lost his grip, the doctors and the Jewish antifascists had been unjustly arrested, East Germany’s “building of socialism” had been misconceived. But Beria, Malenkov insisted, was right for the wrong reasons.

On July 15 Beria lost all his medals, awards, and titles. The intensive interrogation began of everyone who had had contact, official or private, with him. Several dozen women—wives and daughters of party officials, actresses, opera singers, professional prostitutes—were questioned about his sexual techniques. Witnesses came from Baku and Tbilisi to testify that Beria was a British spy who had begun as an Azeri nationalist.⁴³

Six of Beria’s men, Dekanozov, Merkulov, Vlodzimirsky, Meshik, Goglidze, and Bogdan Kobulov—all from Tbilisi except Pavel Meshik, a Ukrainian—were included in the indictment. Hoping to escape their master’s fate, they were cooperative. Beria’s medical records added to the indictment, showing that he frequently had intercourse knowing he was infected with venereal diseases. Fantastic accusations against Beria were made by his servants—that he stuffed women’s bodies down the drains or dissolved them in sulfuric acid—but these were not used in court.

Beria held up well, but when Rudenko finally read out an indictment a hundred pages long he held his hands to his ears and went on hunger strike. The trial was held behind closed doors in the second half of September 1953 with no defense lawyers. The chief judge was Marshal Konev, a fighting general with no legal training. Another judge was General Moskalenko, arrested by Beria in 1938. Moskalenko had the buttons cut off Beria’s trousers to stop him jumping up and down in the dock.⁴⁴