In September several Kremlin doctors were arrested, the first of many. This followed a confidential denunciation of the treatment of Andrei Zhdanov, who had died in 1948. The writer was Dr Lidia Timashuk. Her denunciation, sent soon after Zhdanov’s demise, was pulled out of the archives and used as grounds for a purge of the medical professors in the Kremlin Clinic. Pravda published an article exposing ‘the assassins in white coats’. This caused panic in the elite of the medical profession. Professor Yevdokimov, Stalin’s dental physician and for many years the Kremlin head of maxillofacial and oral surgery, stayed away from home for a week in case the police came for him.30
Yevdokimov returned to his apartment exhausted. Probably he had worked out that the authorities wanted to arrest doctors of Jewish origin. Most victims had surnames appearing to indicate they were Jews. ‘Rootless cosmopolitanism’ was routinely denounced with rising intensity. Jews across the Soviet Union were persecuted. They were sacked from positions of responsibility. They were vilified at work. Anti-semitic jibes on the streets became common and no one was called to account. It required courage for anyone to defend the victims. The campaign, which was never officially designated as being aimed at Jewish citizens, gathered force. Many leading Jews were taken into police custody. Solomon Mikhoels, a leader of the USSR’s Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (formed in the Second World War), was killed in a car crash on Stalin’s orders in 1948; the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was disbanded and the rest of its leadership was arrested and shot.31 But Molotov’s wife Polina Zhemchuzhina, who had been in detention and exile since 1949, was still alive. She was picked as a Jew who might be put at the centre of a forthcoming show trial. Security police resumed their interrogation of her. Rumours grew that measures were being prepared to deport all Soviet Jews to the Jewish Autonomous Region set up in Birobidzhan in eastern Siberia in 1928 (when Stalin and the Politburo had at last come to the conclusion that those Jews of the USSR who wished to retain their ancestral culture should have a territory of their own).
Whether Stalin really intended the universal deportation of Jews in the early 1950s remains unknown, though this is widely treated as a fact; and no conclusive proof has come to light.32 Yet the situation was developing fast. No Jew in the USSR could feel safe. The presentiment of pogroms grew. Kaganovich, being of Jewish ancestry, felt edgy. Perhaps Stalin would have spared him from implication in the Doctors’ Plot. But the precedents were not encouraging. Once purges started, there was no telling where they might end. Already Molotov and Mikoyan had been cast down from on high. With Zhemchuzhina in prison, Molotov had long feared the worst. Both Molotov and Mikoyan had been removed from their leading posts even though they remained Politburo members. But the writing was on the wall for them. Favour, once withdrawn, was seldom given again.
When he came to finalising arrangements for the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952, Stalin had surprises in store. A Central Committee plenum was held in August. This gave him the chance to take the measure of the entire party and governmental leadership, and he did not fail to encourage individuals to criticise each other’s draft directives before they were passed to the Congress. This was also an opportunity for rising young leaders to catch his eye. Among them was Mikhail Pervukhin, already Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Two weeks later Stalin phoned him early on Sunday morning. He asked Pervukhin why he had proposed amendments to the directives at the Central Committee plenum rather than at the Council of Ministers. Pervukhin explained that he felt obstructed by the fact that the directives had already been decided in the Bureau of the Council of Ministers. To Stalin this smelled like conspiracy, especially when he learned that Beria, Malenkov and Bulganin took it in turns to chair the Bureau. Always he sought to break up coalitions among his subordinates. Malenkov and Bulganin remained in his good books but Stalin left nothing to chance. On his instructions the outspoken Pervukhin was promoted to membership of the Bureau.33
Stalin then asked the chastened Malenkov to deliver the Central Committee’s political report. He himself was too frail. Not since 1925 had anyone but Stalin discharged this task. When Kaganovich asked him about this, Stalin artfully replied that he needed to ‘promote the young’.34 This, too, was scarcely good news for Kaganovich; but it was worse for Molotov and Mikoyan. At the meeting to plan the proceedings, Stalin proposed excluding them from the Congress Presidium as being ‘non-active members of the Politburo’. When listeners took this as a joke, Stalin insisted that he meant what he said.35 At the Congress itself Stalin said little, contenting himself with pleasing his audience by sitting in a prominent place on the platform. Policies already in place were confirmed by the eulogies of speakers. Yet divergences in the Politburo were detectable to the ears of the better-informed delegates. Malenkov spoke for light industry, Beria for the non-Russians and Khrushchëv for agriculture. All this was done in Aesopian language. On the surface it was made to seem that Stalin and the Politburo were as close in their opinions as two coats of paint.
His subordinates of course knew he was not gaga and had not attended the Congress just to be its political ornament: he was also listening and watching like a bird of prey. Stalinist conservatism was the order of the day. Failure to go along with the ceremonial plaudits for the policies of party and government would have been suicidal. Malenkov’s report stepped wholly over the threshold of realism with his claim that the problem of grain supplies in the USSR had been solved ‘definitively and for ever’. But such a trespass was safer for a speaker than the slightest sign of dissent.
The Central Committee plenum after the Congress on 16 October 1952 heard Stalin’s last oral salvo. Accompanied by the other leaders, he entered the Sverdlov Hall to an ovation. He made a speech lasting an hour and half; he did this without notes and fixed his audience with a searching gaze.36 His main theme, undeclared, was himself. He implied he was not long for this life. He reminisced about the dangers of early 1918 when enemies beset the infant Soviet state on all sides: ‘And what about Lenin? As regards Lenin, go and re-read what he said and what he wrote at that time. In that incredibly grievous situation he went on roaring. He roared and feared nobody. He roared, roared, roared!’37 Talking about Lenin, he was really describing himself and his contribution to the Revolution. ‘Once I’ve been entrusted with it [a task], I carry it out. And not so that I should get all the credit. I wasn’t brought up like that.’38 When a Central Committee member proudly affirmed that he was Stalin’s pupil, Stalin interjected: ‘We are all pupils of Lenin!’39 This was the nearest he came to leaving behind a political testament. Rather than bequeath recommendations on specific policies, he itemised the qualities needed by the Soviet leadership after his death. They included courage, fearlessness, personal modesty, endurance and Leninism.
His immediate aim was to expose the weaknesses of some potential successors. Unlike Lenin, he unstopped the bottles of his wrath as he poured insults on the heads of his victims. Molotov and Mikoyan were the main casualties. Stalin ranted on with accusations of cowardice and inconsistency, alleging that their trips to the USA had given them an exaggerated admiration of American economic strength. He recalled incidents when Molotov had wanted to soften the demand for grain supplies from the kolkhozes. Molotov took his dressing down without replying. Mikoyan, however, decided that active defence was called for, and he took the lectern to respond.40 Politburo members already knew of Stalin’s hostility to Molotov and Mikoyan, but it was news for other leading members.