Stalin and His Hangmen (75 page)

Beria brought back conventional economics: he told army generals the military was costing too much; he stopped work on gargantuan civil engineering projects – canals in the central Asian deserts, railways over Arctic permafrost – dear to Stalin’s heart, which drained the budget and took thousands of prisoners’ lives. The savings would be used to pay the peasants more, and charge consumers less for food.

In May Beria surpassed even the amnesty when the May Day parade in Red Square took place without the usual giant portraits of the leaders. Was the age of idolatry over? Beria remarked that Canadians had no internal passports and proposed abolishing most restrictions on
movement. All closed cities would now be open, except for three naval bases, and anyone gainfully employed would have the right to live in Moscow and Leningrad. Thanks to Beria, the inhabitants of 300 cities and the frontier zones rejoined the outside world.

Beria was driving the ship of state so fast its crew feared it would break up, and as if he knew that he had but little time, he gave orders that inevitably provoked mutiny. At the end of May he proposed handing power in the western Ukraine and Lithuania to officials native to the area. As a result, Ukrainians took charge of the local party, a move that won Beria popularity among Ukrainian writers and film-makers, but not among the Russified party elite. In Lithuania all official proceedings, Beria insisted, had to be in Lithuanian, and Russian party secretaries who did not speak the local language had to go.
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Belorussia and Latvia benefited in the same way.

Malenkov and Khrushchiov saw this as the wrecking of the USSR and Beria’s next straws broke the camel’s back. On 2 June he tabled measures ‘for creating a healthy political climate in the German Democratic Republic’. The GDR was in crisis. Riots took place as the East Germans saw West Germany overtake them and achieve prosperity, and in two years half a million – including 3,000 party members and 8,000 police – had fled west. Beria proposed negotiating the reunification of a ‘democratic, peace-loving independent Germany’ by letting German communists talk to West German social democrats. Private capital was to be allowed, cooperatives disbanded, harsh punitive measures abolished and prisoners freed. The aim, Beria admitted, was to further ‘the peaceful settlement of international problems’, and he demonstrated this in Hungary by forcing Mátyás Rákosi to take on as his prime minister a Soviet agent, the gentler Imre Nagy. Beria also cancelled Stalin’s plans to assassinate Tito and tried to mend relations with him. In the east, Beria urged the Chinese and North Koreans into peace talks to end the Korean War. He recalled all the MVD’s intelligence agents to Moscow, allowing back out only those who passed an examination in the language of the country where they were posted.

Beria was jeopardizing party rule, Russian dominance and the integrity of the USSR and its eastern European empire. He had to go. The reasons for removing him, Khrushchiov would argue later, were moral: Beria was utterly ruthless and depraved. This was undoubtedly true, although
more went to their deaths on Molotov or Khrushchiov’s signature than on Beria’s. The vital difference was that they killed with a stroke of the pen or a touch of oratory whereas Beria got blood on his shirt. As for Beria’s legendary sexual proclivities, he was certainly guilty of many rapes – usually by blackmail rather than force – and of violating young girls. On the other hand, some of his mistresses were fond, or at least respectful, of him. By the standards of some Soviet leaders, who used the Bolshoi ballet as a brothel, or even compared to J. F. Kennedy or David Lloyd George, Beria was not beyond the pale, even if at intervals during meetings he ordered women to be delivered to his house, as modern politicians order pizzas.

The Hangmen’s End

The wild plums blossom in Tbilisi –

A joy for Molotov to see,

For Voroshilov all the merrier.

But not for L. P. Beria.

Lavrenti Pavlych Beria

Has failed the main criteria.

A heap of ash,
Deo volente
,

Is all that’s left of our Lavrenti.

Anonymous, 1953

Beria knew everything about everyone, but from March to June 1953 he gave no hint of intending to use his knowledge to slaughter his colleagues. Never had there been fewer arrests in the USSR, and there were virtually no executions. Beria had lost his taste for blood. Dismissed party secretaries became ambassadors or managers. The MVD halted its assassinations abroad. Beria’s threat was not to Khrushchiov and Malenkov, but to the system that kept them in power.
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The mystery is why Beria did nothing to protect himself. For thirty-three years he had been one of the most skilful political operators on earth, and now he let a group of mediocrities forget their differences and topple him.

Personal popularity in the USSR, even among the secret police, counted for little; in any case, even if Beria had brought relief to the surviving two million Jews and dozens of professors of medicine, yet another Georgian governing a fundamentally Russian state would have been intolerable for the rank and file of the party. Beria started building a holiday village of dachas for government and party officials near Sukhum, but to many this bribe looked like a trap.

East Germany gave Khrushchiov an opportunity. Beria’s proposals to defuse the tension had come too late and rioting workers in Berlin and other cities had been crushed, on Beria’s own orders, by Soviet tanks. To Molotov, minister for foreign affairs, this proved Beria’s incompetence. Fear overrode caution, Molotov joined the conspiracy and his seniority ensured its success.

Khrushchiov had first to detach Malenkov, often photographed arm in arm with Beria but now worried by the demotion of many of his protégés. Khrushchiov then battled with Voroshilov’s timorousness and Kaganovich’s vacillation. The plot was hatched in parks and on the streets, lest Beria’s men were tapping their telephones or bugging their apartments. By the end of June, the Presidium was won over, although Mikoyan and Voroshilov, likewise sated with bloodshed, wanted Beria not killed but sent back to Baku where the party had found him, as minister for oil production.

Two armed forces had to be won over: at least part of the secret police and the army. In the MVD Sergei Kruglov and Ivan Serov willingly betrayed their master; they hated Beria’s Caucasians – the Kobulovs, Goglidze – being promoted over Russian heads. Khrushchiov sounded out the army through Bulganin. Beria had a few friends in the Red Army, but men like General Shtemenko, whom he had made chief of the general staff, were shunned, and many senior officers had never forgiven or forgotten Beria’s torture and murder of Bliukher in 1938. Khrushchiov won over Marshal Moskalenko and carefully seduced Marshal Zhukov, who had been demoted by Stalin and saved from death by Beria, with promises of glory.

It was hard to gather armed men without alerting Beria’s agents. In May Bulganin sent army officers who might not have cooperated to the provinces on exercises while Malenkov and Molotov encouraged Beria to pay a flying visit to Berlin with army generals. Beria was suspicious
and discovered a Presidium meeting was to be held. He flew back; the conspirators were in disarray and the meeting confined itself to tedious agricultural questions. Some witnesses report Beria alerting groups of parachutists outside Moscow and arming party workers in the Caucasus.

The coup was staged on 26 June during another Presidium meeting. Only Malenkov, Bulganin and Khrushchiov knew what would happen. Each Kremlin guard was shadowed by an army officer, ostensibly for training purposes. Bulganin brought his trusted generals in his limousine, all except Zhukov carrying handguns, against the rules, into the Kremlin. Marshal Zhukov, the generals and a dozen party men lurked in the waiting room outside Stalin’s study. Khrushchiov told them to enter when a bell rang twice.

Beria arrived late, wearing a crumpled grey suit and no tie. He asked about the agenda, and was told ‘Lavrenti Beria’. Malenkov’s notes for the start of the meeting are the only surviving document:

Enemies have tried to place the MVD above party and government… Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia. Are these measures necessary?… Beria… controls the party and government. This is redolent of great dangers, if delayed, too late to put right…
We need a monolithic collective
and we have one… Comrades are not sure who’s eavesdropping on whom… make him minister of oil production. Next!… Who wants to discuss it?
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A farcical meeting began. Beria was replying to the abuse when Malenkov rang the bell and Marshal Zhukov entered with four officers. They stood behind Beria, two men putting revolvers to his head. Beria sat and wrote the word ‘alarm’ nineteen times. He was taken to the ante-room and searched. His pince-nez, which he never saw again, was removed.

Beria was driven first to an army barracks. The next day he was visited by his former deputy Kruglov, who now took his job. Because of the rumoured parachutists, Beria was moved to an underground concrete bunker. Army officers occupied the Lubianka. Tanks entered Moscow and Bulganin told the soldiers that Beria, Abakumov and the rest of the old MGB were planning mass terror. The tanks left town to disarm two divisions of MVD troops before returning to surround the city centre.

Beria’s portraits were removed from all offices. Three MVD men swept the contents of Beria’s safe into a sack; most papers were burnt for
fear of what they might contain. In Berlin Ulbricht breathed a sigh of relief as Beria’s agents were recalled and the danger of the GDR merging with West Germany receded.

In his first week in the bunker Beria obtained from his warder General Batitsky scraps of paper and a pencil. He appealed to Malenkov at once: ‘Egor do you really not know I’ve been picked up by some strange people I want to set out the circumstances when you summon me.’ Two days later, he sent another slip of paper: ‘Egor, why don’t you answer?’ Beria asked for his selfless work to be remembered, for forgiveness ‘if there was anything to forgive during these fifteen years of hard, intense work together’ and for his mother, wife and son to be looked after. Beria’s son, pregnant daughter-in-law and two grandchildren had been arrested the same day; Nina Beria followed them. Beria’s deaf-mute sister and elderly mother were for a time left alone.

On 1 July Beria wrote to Malenkov and his other accusers a rambling penitential letter: ‘My behaviour towards you, where I am 100 per cent in the wrong, is especially bad and unforgivable’. He reminded Malenkov that they had agreed on some of the reforms, and that his mistake had been to circulate Interior Ministry documents that might embarrass Khrushchiov and Bulganin. He regretted his proposals to free East Germany and his actions against Rákosi. Beria could not rouse Malenkov’s conscience but he could appeal to his sense of self-preservation. The letter hinted that they might go down together.

To convince Molotov that he had always spoken well of him, Beria begged him to contact his family. He also reminded Molotov how they had gone to see Stalin when war broke out to rouse him to action. He appealed to Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Khrushchiov and Bulganin: ‘I’ve never done anything bad to you.’ Beria wanted badly to live and offered to work on a farm, a building site.

The next day self-pity turned to panic: ‘Dear comrades,’ Beria wrote, ‘they are going to get rid of me without trial or investigation, after five days’ incarceration, without one interrogation, I beg you not to allow this, to intervene immediately, or it will be too late. You have to get in first by telephone.’ He asked for his case to be investigated by a commission. ‘Dear comrades, surely executing a member of the Central Committee, and your comrade, in a cellar after five days in prison is not the only correct way of deciding and clarifying a case without a trial…
I beg Comrades Malenkov and Khrushchiov not to be stubborn would it really be bad if a comrade was rehabilitated?’

Beria was given no more paper. Khrushchiov chose a new chief prosecutor, the young and eager Roman Rudenko who had shone at Nuremberg, as the previous prosecutor Grigori Safonov had queried Beria’s arrest, which had been carried out by army officers with no warrant. On 2 July a plenary Central Committee meeting began. For six days several hundred men and two women, a handful of whom had suffered at Beria’s hands and many of whom owed their careers to him, listened, baying like hounds, to denunciations and disavowals. The participants all spoke so basely that the records of the meeting had to be falsified.
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There had been less moral turpitude in the terrifying plenum of spring 1938 which condemned Bukharin and Iagoda.

Khrushchiov admitted that the doctors’ plot and the Mingrelian affair had been fabrications – not that his audience thought that they should be put right. Khrushchiov implied that Beria only reprieved people who then became his agents. His preamble then degenerated into the incoherence that overcame most speakers. Beria, it turned out, had caused shortages of bread and meat; he did not care about the workers, which was why they lived in dugouts. His rehabilitation of the doctors was pure self-publicity; he had amnestied half the GULAG to build up a fief of thieves and murderers loyal to him. He was a man ‘of Bonaparte spirit ready to cross mountains of corpses and rivers of blood’ for power.