The scenario was close to completion for a final settling of accounts. Molotov, Mikoyan and Beria lived in dread. The Central Committee set up a Presidium as its main executive organ instead of the Politburo. Stalin read out the list of proposed members. The entire list was accepted without discussion.41 The new Party Presidium was to have an internal Bureau, and neither Molotov nor Mikoyan was appointed to it.42 (Beria gained a place, but this was no serious consolation; he knew that Stalin had often worked with a salami-slicer when starting a purge.) When the Presidium met on 18 October, Malenkov was put in charge of its permanent commission on foreign affairs, Bulganin was to supervise ‘questions of defence’ and Shepilov was to head the commission on ‘ideological questions’.43 Old though he was, Stalin still had applied himself to reading reports, plotting his manoeuvres and attending crucial meetings — and, as in 1937, he passed up the opportunity to take a vacation that whole year. The Bureau met six times in the remaining weeks of 1952 and Stalin attended on each occasion.44 Much of the proceedings centred on personnel postings. But there was also discussion of business of a distinctly sinister nature. Stalin raised the question ‘of sabotage in medical work’; he also required a report ‘about the situation in the MGB of the USSR’.45
Stalin desired to bind an official party organ behind the wagon of his conspiracy. The risk of a coup against him needed to be reduced. By moving slowly and obtaining formal sanction for each stage of the way, he also hoped to convince the younger and therefore less experienced Bureau members that his measures were based on solid evidence. The killer needed to secure his alibi and his legendary guile had not left him.
His veteran accomplices were shivering with trepidation. Not only Beria but also Malenkov, Khrushchëv and Bulganin knew from experience that they could not assume that Stalin would not eventually pick them off too. He could not be trusted: that much was obvious to everybody. Things were getting bad. On 21 December 1952 Molotov and Mikoyan, after much vacillation, decided to go out to Stalin’s Blizhnyaya dacha to greet him on his birthday. They had done this for many years and, although he had recently shown hostility to them, they thought the hostility might increase if they broke the custom. They were mistaken. The visit annoyed Stalin, and the other Presidium members advised Molotov and Mikoyan to keep out of his sight.46 Yet still his entire demeanour baffled as well as scared everyone. Plainly he was not the person he once had been. After his death his associates were to remark on a psychological as well as a physical deterioration in him. They noted the onset of an unpredictability which they called ‘capricious’. Previously he had stayed fairly loyal to the group of leaders he had established in the late 1930s; the Leningrad Affair of 1949–50 had been the exception, not the rule, in the post-war years.47 But he had come to proffer or withdraw favour with an arbitrariness that terrified them.
So what was the Leader up to? Was there a great plan behind the moves he was making? Would the elimination of several veterans — and the persecution of all Jews — mark the end of any projected purge? Could such a purge be carried through to its end by a man whose physical decline was unmistakable? To his close associates, whether or not they had been denounced by him, there appeared no point in guessing about precise motives. Stalin had been killing fellow politicians for many years. He had not lost the habit with the onset of decrepitude.
54. DEATH AND EMBALMING
As 1952 was drawing to a close, Stalin held a birthday party in the large reception room at his Blizhnyaya dacha on 21 December.1 The Boss was intent on having a good time and had invited the leading politicians. His daughter Svetlana was also present. Pictures of Soviet children covered the walls. Stalin had also arranged for paintings of scenes from the works of Gorki and Sholokhov to be pinned up.2 Much drink was consumed. The gramophone played folk and dance music all night long, and Stalin was in charge of the choice of discs. It was a merry occasion.
Yet two guests looked glum. One was Khrushchëv, who hated having to dance and called himself ‘a cow on ice’. Mischievously Stalin called upon him to perform the energetic Ukrainian gopak. Perhaps the Boss, who as a boy failed to master the lekuri,3 derived perverse satisfaction from his embarrassment. The other person who did not enjoy the evening was Svetlana. At the age of twenty-six, already twice married and a mother, she could not stand being told what to do and rejected his request for a dance with her. His shortened arm usually inhibited Stalin from taking to the floor but he had had a glass or two that evening. When Svetlana demurred he flew into a rage. Grabbing her ginger hair, he dragged her forward. Her face turned red and her eyes filled with tears of pain and humiliation. Other guests felt for her but could do nothing. Khrushchëv, still smarting from his own embarrassment, never forgot the scene: ‘[Stalin] shuffled around with his arms spread out. It was evident that he had never danced before.’ But he did not judge Stalin harshly. ‘He behaved so brutishly not because he wanted to cause hurt to Svetlana. No, his behaviour toward her was really an expression of affection, but in the perverse, brutish form that was peculiar to him.’4
Other revellers worried about something a lot worse than being yanked by the hair on to a dance floor. The probable imminence of a political purge agitated all of them. Pravda on 13 January 1953 published an editorial on ‘Evil Spies and Murderers Masked as Medical Professors’. Stalin had edited the text.5 Although he stayed all this time at Blizhnyaya, he was no mere spectator of the complex political drama.6 Members of the Party Presidium — as the Politburo had been redesignated — read Pravda with their hearts in their mouths. The tension was reaching breaking point. On 28 February Stalin invited Malenkov, Beria, Khrush-chëv and Bulganin to watch a film with him at the dacha. Stalin was as welcoming a host as ever. Food and drink were lavish. Party Presidium members, after a skinful of Georgian wine, tried to avoid saying anything that might annoy the Leader. When dinner was over, Stalin told the servants to open the cinema facility in the ground-floor gallery. The party broke up at four o’clock in the morning of 1 March.7 None of the departing grandees recalled that Stalin looked ill. According to Khrushchëv, they left him well oiled and on good form.8 This was to be expected after a long night of carousing.
As the limousines of his visitors departed into the darkness of the Moscow countryside, Stalin gave a quick instruction to his guards. One of them, Pavel Lozgachëv, reported the contents to his chief Ivan Khrustalëv. Stalin had announced that he was going to bed and that they could go off duty and sleep; he had also ordered that the guards should not disturb him until such time as he called them into his rooms.9
From mid-morning on 1 March disquiet grew among the guards when they came on duty because Stalin failed to beckon them inside. The routine had been in place for years. A group known as the mobile security team patrolled Blizhnyaya dacha. Each guard’s shift alternated between two hours on duty and two hours’ rest so as to maintain alertness. The guards’ positions around the dacha were designated by numbers.10 Stalin’s unusual ban on disturbing him stayed in force, and yet they all knew that they would get the blame if something untoward had happened. His habit was to ask for a glass of tea with a slice of lemon in the late morning. He was as regular as clockwork. Deputy commander Mikhail Starostin became nervous that no such request had been made.11 There was no higher authority at the dacha to turn to. Poskrëbyshev and Vlasik were no longer in post and it was unclear who in the Party Presidium, if anybody, could and would countermand a personal order given by Stalin. This was a situation which had worked to Stalin’s advantage when he was fit. He was about to pay a fatal price for his extraordinary concentration of power.