During a Politburo meeting presided over by Stalin in February 1949, Kuznetsov, Voznesensky, and other functionaries close to them were charged with attempting to turn the Leningrad party organization into their own fiefdom. Particularly ominous was a resolution comparing their actions to those of Zinoviev in the 1920s, “when he attempted to turn the Leningrad organization into a power base for his anti-Leninist faction.”65 In the months that followed, charges against the beleaguered Leningraders snowballed. They were accused of enemy activity and even espionage. In September 1950, after months of interrogations and torture, Voznesensky, Kuznetsov, and a number of other leaders were sentenced to death in a closed Leningrad courtroom. Several hundred others were given death sentences, imprisoned, or exiled. The purge also affected other regions of the country, where natives of Leningrad held senior posts or had sought support from highly placed Leningraders in Moscow.
The way the Leningrad Affair unfolded suggests that Stalin was using it to pursue multiple goals. It may have been part of his ongoing pattern of intimidation to consolidate power. The accusations of patronage and the large-scale dismantling of networks of officials who made their careers in Leningrad were typical of the preemptive strikes Stalin liked to launch against informal networks within the nomenklatura.66 He may also have viewed the Leningrad Affair as part of a larger shake-up at the upper echelons. In any event, the fabrication of evidence against the Leningraders at first unfolded in synchrony with Stalin’s attacks against his old comrades Molotov and Mikoyan. These assaults seem all the more likely to be connected as Molotov had maintained close professional ties with Voznesensky and was on friendly terms with him. Furthermore, while the Leningrad Affair was in full swing, Mikoyan’s son was preparing to marry Kuznetsov’s daughter and, rather surprisingly, proceeded with this plan.
Whatever the reasons for Stalin’s displeasure, Molotov and Mikoyan were its most natural targets. They were his oldest and most distinguished comrades, symbols of the collective leadership that might have been, and the presumptive heirs of the aging vozhd. The task of bolstering his personal power—Stalin’s prime obsession—required him, he felt, to periodically discredit his most influential associates in order to weaken their influence.
For several years the actions Stalin took against Molotov in late 1945 were known only within the narrow circle of the Politburo. Molotov continued to perform key governmental functions: he chaired a number of Council of Ministers commissions, headed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and had a voice on a wide array of questions. This status began to change in 1948. On various pretexts, Stalin used reprimands and limitations on his authority to diminish Molotov’s standing. The main means of pressure was the fabrication of evidence against Molotov’s ethnically Jewish wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, showing her to be involved with “anti-Soviet” Jewish organizations. Stalin demanded that Molotov divorce her. “Stalin,” Molotov later recalled, “came up to me at the Central Committee: ‘You have to divorce your wife!’ And she said to me, ‘If it’s necessary for the party, then we’ll get divorced.’ In late 1948 we divorced.”67
On 29 December 1948, “evidence” compiled by state security in the Zhemchuzhina case was brought before the Politburo. She was expelled from the party, a move that meant that arrest was imminent. Molotov abstained from voting, an action that put him in direct conflict with Stalin.68 On 20 January 1949 Molotov sent the vozhd a formulaic expression of remorse:
During Central Committee voting on a proposal to expel P. S. Zhemchuzhina from the party I abstained, which I admit to be politically mistaken. I hereby state that having thought over this question, I vote in favor of the Central Committee decision, which corresponds to the interests of the party and the state and teaches a correct understanding of the meaning of Communist Party membership. Furthermore, I admit my grievous guilt in that I did not duly restrain Zhemchuzhina, someone close to me, from false steps and ties with anti-Soviet Jewish nationalists, such as Mikhoels.69
In March 1949, Molotov was dismissed from the post of foreign minister, and Mikoyan was relieved of his duties as minister for foreign trade. These dismissals did not mean that the two men were cast out of the government. Both remained members of the Politburo and deputy chairmen of the government, and in these capacities they fulfilled important administrative functions. But their political authority was damaged, an outcome that undoubtedly was Stalin’s true objective.
The use of Zhemchuzhina’s origins in formulating the charges against her reflected a policy of state anti-Semitism that Stalin launched as confrontation with the West intensified. In early 1948 he ordered state security to destroy the prominent Jewish intellectual and theatrical director Solomon Mikhoels. Later that year he ordered the dissolution of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which had been founded during the war to mobilize international support for the USSR. The authorities had begun to view the committee as a nest of spies with ties to foreign intelligence agencies. Over the next few years, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee Affair gradually engulfed more victims, until it ended with a closed trial held from May through July 1952. All the defendants but one were shot.70 In 1949, the arrests of Jewish public figures were supplemented with a wide-ranging campaign against “cosmopolitanism.” Many Soviet Jews were arrested, fired from their jobs, and made targets of discrimination and contempt.
Newly available documents confirm what most historians have long believed: such campaigns could not have been conducted without Stalin’s support and involvement. This fact raises legitimate questions about the motives behind Stalin’s anti-Semitism. It is tempting to assume that in the final years of Stalin’s life he merely became more open about a Judophobia he had always held as a predictable aspect of his general misanthropy. The evidence, however, suggests that his postwar anti-Semitism was primarily a product of domestic and foreign policy calculations. A complex set of historical factors lay behind his turn toward anti-Semitism as a political tool.
Foremost among these factors was the evident growth in anti-Semitism in the USSR. In no small part because of Nazi propaganda, anti-Semitic feelings and beliefs had spread among certain segments of Soviet society. During the war, even highly placed Soviet functionaries did not hesitate to lace their reports with anti-Semitic comments. In January 1944 the deputy commander of Soviet air forces, General Grigory Vorozheikin, wrote to Stalin and other Soviet leaders about the problem of having too many members of the military working in comfortable jobs at headquarters or in commissaries. Regarding those manning the commissaries that sold items to the troops—voentorgs—he wrote, “At the fronts they’re called not ‘voentorgs’ but ‘abramtorgs.’ … All of these ‘abramtorgs’ should be sent to fight.”71 Among the letters Stalin placed in his personal archive during the postwar years we find some expressing anti-Semitic feelings and others complaining about the spread of anti-Semitism. One writer, who accused Jews of shirking physical labor, offered a proposal on how to “reeducate” them: “Separating Jews, as a worthy nation, into a separate republic … and making them work on a justly organized basis would be widely approved by all the other peoples of the Soviet Union.”72 Stalin undoubtedly was aware of the prevalence of such feelings and took them into consideration.