The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

In January 1953 the MGB was officially accused of “lack of vigilance” in hunting down the conspirators. The Soviet news agency Tass made the sensational announcement that for the past few years world Zionism and Western intelligence agencies had been conspiring with “a terrorist group” of Jewish doctors “to wipe out the leadership of the Soviet Union.” During the final two months of Stalin’s rule, the MGB struggled to demonstrate its heightened vigilance by pursuing the perpetrators of this non-existent plot. Its anti-Zionist campaign was, in reality, little more than a thinly disguised anti-Semitic pogrom. Shortly before Stalin’s sudden death in March 1953, Mitrokhin was ordered to investigate the alleged Zionist connections of the Pravda correspondent in Paris, Yuri Zhukov, who had come under suspicion because of his wife’s Jewish origins. Mitrokhin had the impression that Stalin’s brutal security supremo, Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, was planning to implicate Zhukov in the supposed Jewish doctors’ plot. A few weeks after Stalin’s funeral, however, Beria suddenly announced that the plot had never existed, and exonerated the alleged conspirators.

By the summer of 1953 most of Beria’s colleagues in the Presidium were united in their fear of another conspiracy—that he might be planning a coup d’état to step into Stalin’s shoes. While visiting a foreign capital in July, Mitrokhin received a top secret telegram with instructions to decipher it himself, and was astonished to discover that Beria had been charged with “criminal anti-Party and anti-state activities.” Only later did Mitrokhin learn that Beria had been arrested at a special meeting of the Presidium on June 26 after a plot organized by his chief rival, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. From his prison cell, Beria wrote begging letters to his former colleagues, pleading pathetically for them to spare his life and “find the smallest job for me”:

You will see that in two or three years I’ll have straightened out fine and will still be useful to you… I ask the comrades to forgive me for writing somewhat disjointedly and badly because of my condition, and also because of the poor lighting and not having my pince-nez.

No longer in awe of him, the comrades simply mocked his loss of nerve.

On December 24 it was announced that Beria had been executed after trial by the Supreme Court. Since neither his responsibility for mass murder in the Stalin era nor his own record as a serial rapist of under-age girls could be publicly mentioned for fear of bringing the Communist regime into disrepute, he was declared guilty instead of a surreal plot “to revive capitalism and to restore the rule of the bourgeoisie” in association with British and other Western intelligence services. Beria thus became, following Yagoda and Yezhov in the 1930s, the third Soviet security chief to be shot for crimes which included serving as an (imaginary) British secret agent. In true Stalinist tradition, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were advised to use “a small knife or razor blade” to remove the entry on Beria, and then to insert a replacement article on the Bering Sea.⁴

The first official repudiation of Stalinism was Khrushchev’s now-celebrated secret speech to a closed session of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in February 1956. Stalin’s “cult of personality,” Khrushchev declared, had been responsible for “a whole series of exceedingly serious and grave perversions of Party principles, of Party democracy, of revolutionary legality.” The speech was reported to the KGB Party organization in a secret letter from the Central Committee. The section to which Mitrokhin belonged took two days to debate its contents. He still vividly recalls the conclusion of the section’s chairman, Vladimir Vasilyevich Zhenikhov (later KGB resident in Finland): “Stalin was a bandit!” Some Party members were too shocked—or cautious—to say anything. Others agreed with Zhenikhov. None dared ask the question which Mitrokhin was convinced was in all their minds: “Where was Khrushchev while all these crimes were taking place?”