Having terrified the chekists, Stalin left for a vacation of more than four months. While in the south, he continued to keep a close eye on state security. The inventory of materials sent to Stalin between 11 August and 21 December 1951 includes more than 160 Ministry of State Security memoranda and reports. He also received an indeterminable number of coded telegrams from the ministry, as well as Politburo and Council of Ministers resolutions having to do with state security.117 In October Stalin summoned Ignatiev to the south and ordered him to “kick all the Jews out” of the ministry. When Ignatiev naively asked, “Where to?” Stalin explained to the inexperienced minister: “I’m not saying you should throw them out onto the street. Lock them up and let them stay in prison.”118 Ignatiev turned out to be a quick learner. Mortally terrified, he obediently launched a series of arrests and fabricated cases having to do with a “Zionist plot” within his ministry. For Stalin, extending his campaign of state anti-Semitism to state security was a perfectly logical step. Jews, members of a suspect nation and potential henchmen of world imperialism, could not be allowed to work in the regime’s most sacred realm. The next targets were just as logical. Immediately after state security, Stalin initiated purges against highly placed functionaries in several branches of the party-state apparat.
The next round of repression was also orchestrated from his dacha in the south. In September 1951 he received a visit from Georgia’s minister for state security, Nikolai Rukhadze. As Rukhadze testified under interrogation after his arrest, Stalin made some general comments at the dinner table about the dominance of Mingrelians (Megrels) in Georgia; he noted that Beria was a Mingrelian and was giving patronage to this group.119 This comment was the first hint at the target of the next campaign: Georgian officials and their patron. Soon after Rukhadze’s visit, the head of Stalin’s security team, Nikolai Vlasik, reported to the vozhd that people were complaining about having to pay bribes to enter Georgian colleges and universities. That this information fit perfectly with Stalin’s new focus is hardly surprising. Vlasik, who had spent a good portion of his life by Stalin’s side, had developed a keen sense of his moods and a talent for telling him what he wanted to hear. He could tell that Stalin was thirsting for blood and sought out the compromising materials that would help satisfy his boss’s craving. Rukhadze was assigned to look into Vlasik’s allegations.
On 29 October 1951, Rukhadze reported to Stalin that the bribery charges mostly could not be confirmed.120 This made no difference. Stalin had decided on a purge in Georgia, and it was only a matter of time before he invented a pretext for it. On 3 November he telephoned Rukhadze and asked him for information about patronage by Georgia’s second party secretary, Mikhail Baramiia, the former procurator of the city of Sukhumi, who had been accused of taking bribes. Rukhadze did as he was told, preparing a document suggesting that Baramiia had protected Mingrelian officials guilty of crimes.121 The case was handled expeditiously. With Stalin’s active involvement, sweeping repression was unleashed in Georgia. Many of the republic’s leaders, including Baramiia, were arrested. More than eleven thousand people were deported to remote areas of the Soviet Union.122
The Mingrelian and Leningrad Affairs largely followed the same template. Both started with accusations of abuse of power and political protectionism (shefstvo), quickly followed by the arrest and torture of disgraced officials, leading to fabricated evidence of “anti-Soviet” and “espionage” organizations. As in Leningrad, here too Stalin targeted a specific clan of Soviet officials with ties to influential members of the country’s leadership—in this case Beria.123 Whether to make a mockery of him or simply teach him a lesson in humility, Stalin assigned Beria to hold a plenum of Georgia’s Central Committee in 1952, at which he was forced to expose his former clients and feign shock and anger at their behavior. Undoubtedly Beria saw the purge in Georgia as a personal threat. Immediately after Stalin’s death he managed to put a stop to the Mingrelian Affair and had its targets freed and returned to senior positions.124
Beria weathered the storm. Like many before him, however, he emerged with a renewed sense of the fragility of his political and physical existence. Stalin apparently had his sights on more important targets. The first shot was fired after the Nineteenth Party Congress, which convened in October 1952 after a thirteen-year break. Instead of giving the keynote speech, Stalin limited his appearance at the congress to a brief closing statement. It was as if he was saving his diminishing strength for the main event: the plenum of the newly elected Central Committee, which immediately followed the congress. The plenum would determine the makeup of the party’s top governing bodies, most important the Politburo. The election was expected to be a mere formality. Members of the Central Committee usually voted for the candidates proposed from on high without wasting their breath on discussion. But in this case Stalin caught everyone by surprise and introduced some surprising changes.
His main innovation was the abolition of the Politburo and the creation of two new bodies. The first, which formally replaced the Politburo, was called the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.125 Whereas the Politburo had included nine members with full voting rights and two candidate members, the new Presidium was much larger, comprising twenty-five full members and eleven candidate members. The expansion would add younger and relatively unknown party leaders, giving Stalin an even freer hand in regard to his older comrades. The political essence of the reorganization was summed up, probably correctly, by Anastas Mikoyan: “Since the makeup of the Presidium was so broad, if needed, the disappearance of Presidium members out of favor with Stalin would not be so noticeable. If between congresses five or six people disappeared out of twenty-five, that would look like an insignificant change. If, on the other hand, five or six people out of nine Politburo members disappeared, that would be more noticeable.”126
This was exactly the sort of apprehension Stalin needed to keep the will of the old guard and potential heirs in check. Not satisfied with the threat implicit in the expanded Central Committee Presidium, Stalin continued his psychological warfare. His next proposal—the creation of a nine-member bureau to serve as the Presidium leadership—was just as unexpected. In principle, the Presidium Bureau made sense. The unwieldy Presidium would hardly be capable of efficient decision making. But Stalin, as he had often done, could of course create a narrow leadership group without formal approval by the Central Committee plenum. The true purpose of this toying with democracy became immediately clear once he disclosed his proposed candidates for the bureau. It turned out that he did not feel it was possible for him to nominate two of his oldest associates—Molotov and Mikoyan—for membership. To add insult to injury, he topped off this announcement by giving the two a public tongue-lashing.