The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (51 page)

By February 1953, Stalin was an elderly man who often failed to recognize his henchmen as he sat in Dacha Number One, protected by rotating shifts of twelve hundred armed secret police.
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Toward the end, he filled his time planning show trials to mark the beginning of the latest clampdown. Lists of questions were drawn up for the Politburo members, together with the confessions they would provide. The fear of neglected victims haunted Stalin, flashing in the corners of his paranoid, yellow-filmed eyes. At this point, even Vyacheslav Molotov’s life was in danger: he had been replaced as foreign minister three years earlier, when Stalin ordered the return of the original documents of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to be used as evidence against him.
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Years later, in retirement, the former Soviet premier admitted, “I think that if he had lived another year or so, I might not have survived.” Molotov had been forced to attend a Politburo meeting to authorize the arrest of his Jewish wife, Polina. At the meeting, Molotov had abstained from the vote but later regretted this veiled display of opposition and wrote to Stalin:
“I hereby declare that after thinking the matter over I now vote in favour of the Central Committee’s decision . . . Furthermore I acknowledge that I was gravely at fault in not restraining in time a person near to me from taking false steps.”
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At this time Stalin’s daughter visited her father at his dacha. In her memoirs, Svetlana Alliluyeva described how surprised she had been to see pictures pinned up on the walls of the dacha. Her father had surrounded himself with enlarged magazine photographs, mostly pictures of young children: a little girl drinking goat’s milk from a horn, a boy on skis, children having a picnic under a cherry tree.
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This was the private life of the most powerful man on earth, a recluse who held the destiny of the world in his well-guarded, uncommunicative reverie. According to Svetlana, “He saw enemies everywhere. It had reached the point of being pathological, of persecution mania.” Once, Stalin even turned on his daughter, shouting angrily, “You yourself make anti-Soviet statements.” Svetlana was, of course, watched over at all times “for her protection,” but she was still aware of the truth of the society in which she lived. Her imprisoned aunt had told her how she had signed her own confession:
“You sign anything there, just to be left alone and not tortured! At night no one could sleep for the shrieks of agony in the cells. Victims screamed in an unearthly way, begging to be killed, better to be killed . . .”
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BUT ALL MEN are mortal, even Stalin. This knowledge kept the Gulag prisoners alive, including Thomas Sgovio, who was still cutting down trees in Boguchanni during the winter of 1953. For a prisoner with the same routine, time starts to bend: each day seems interminable, and yet the minute hand of the Gulag swept years into decades. Early on in Thomas’ sentence, Lucy Flaxman had visited him in Boguchanni, but the couple quarreled after she told him that she had informed on an English journalist in Moscow. They agreed to go their separate ways, and as Thomas’ isolation continued, time fell away, until March 5, 1953.
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In the early 1930s there had once been a joke that “SSSR”—the Russian initials for the Soviet state—stood for
Smert Stalina Spaset Rossiiu
(“Stalin’s death will save Russia”).
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The Russian people had waited long and grief-filled decades to find out. In the camps, the prisoners scrutinized photographs of “the Mustache,” or “the Old One,” as Stalin was called by those who knew better than to speak his name. One prisoner was heard to mutter, “He doesn’t look well to me. See his eyes—how old and tired they are.” And when the news reached them that Stalin had been taken ill, many prisoners openly prayed, “May the devil take his soul today!” One old man fell to his knees in the water of a mine. “Thank God someone still looks out for the wretched.”
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On March 5, 1953, Thomas Sgovio spent the day felling trees as normal. Only when he returned from the forest did he hear the rumors that Stalin was dying. The local store was suddenly filled with customers buying vodka to carry home in silence, ready for their secret celebrations. Across the camps of the Soviet Union, millions of prisoners marching under guard passed the news along in excited whispers: “He’s croaked! He’s croaked!”
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The “Greatest Friend of Soviet Families” had suffered a stroke in his dacha outside Moscow, lying untreated on his bedroom floor for several hours, his bodyguards too fearful to disturb him. Surrounded by terrified doctors, Stalin’s final hours were slow and agonizing. His face altered shape and grew dark; his lips blackened and his features became grotesque, his lungs struggled for breath, his body gasping as if he were slowly being strangled, choking to death in front of his henchmen. At the final moment, according to Svetlana, her father suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room:

 
 
IN THE EARLY hours of March 6, 1953, Radio Moscow broadcast the news of an important announcement in fifteen minutes. The time passed in silence, only for the message to be repeated. Finally at almost 4:00 A.M., the news was confirmed that Stalin had died at 9:50 P.M. the night before.

That morning Moscow was covered in red flags with black borders, and the newspapers carried the markings of national grief.
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As preparations began for the state funeral, the whole of the Soviet Union fell into solemnity, everyone consciously watching their neighbors’ reaction to the news. For some, it was a moment of suppressed joy. Others shed tears, if not for the man then for the years they had lost and the loved ones who had disappeared. And there were those who could not distinguish between public grief and private feeling. They had pretended for so long now, their self-deception had become real. As Radio Moscow broadcast requiems into the March air, green funeral wreaths were placed as tokens of mourning on trams and taxis.
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Overcome with hysteria, grown men and women sobbed. They held Stalin’s portrait aloft like an icon: the man who had promised them heaven on earth, and delivered an unremitting hell.

Millions converged from across the Soviet Union toward the Hall of Columns, where the body of Joseph Stalin was lying in state. Did they esteem him so much or did they want to make sure he was really dead? It was easy to believe in the immortality of evil, to forget that every dictator must eventually die. Although even from beyond the grave, Stalin would demand a final sacrifice. Rows of trucks had been placed around the building as a security barrier, and as the crowds surged, people began to be crushed against them. Eyewitnesses reported that hundreds were killed, screaming, “Save Me! Save Me!” as they were pressed and trampled underfoot.
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The Moscow morgues were filled to overflowing, although there was never any public record of this disaster published in the Soviet media. When Robert Robinson went to view Stalin’s body the following day, the crowds were still overwhelming. Caught in a surge, for fifteen seconds he felt his feet leave the ground and he was treading on thin air.
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At the front of the funeral cortège, holding Stalin’s coffin, Lavrenty Beria marched with his black coat falling past his knees, a stern expression on his spectacled face. Beside and behind him were the rest of the inner circle: Malenkov, Molotov, Bulganin, Kaganovich, and Khrushchev, each looking suitably austere. The pallbearers carried Stalin’s coffin decorated with a solitary marshal’s cap, the Plexiglas dome covering his face and lending the proceedings a strangely futuristic air. As the apparatchiks strained under Stalin’s weight, they passed slowly out of the Hall of Columns. The coffin was then placed on a gun carriage and ceremoniously marched to Red Square, passing in front of the American embassy on Mokhovaya Street, where the Stars and Stripes was flown at half-mast as a mark of respect.

After the funeral eulogies, the embalmed body was carried down into the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square, on which Stalin’s name was already carved into the red marble. The American chargé d’affaires, Jacob Beam— as instructed by Washington—tendered “the official condolences” of the United States government.
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At the United Nations Plaza in New York, the flags of sixty nations were taken down as a mark of respect for one of history’s greatest mass murderers. Only the United Nations flag was flown at half-mast. In America, the recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize for 1952, Paul Robeson, led the eulogies at a memorial meeting:
“Slava—slava—slava—Stalin, Glory to Stalin. Forever will his name be honored and beloved in all lands . . . Yes, through his deep humanity, by his wise understanding, he leaves us a rich and monumental heritage . . . He leaves tens of millions all over the earth bowed in heart-aching grief. But, as he well knew, the struggle continues. So, inspired by his noble example, let us lift our heads slowly but proudly high and march forward in the fight for peace . . .

 
 
AFTER THE FUNERAL in the Soviet Union, there was an immediate lessening of the psychological pressure—as if the strong hands on the windpipe had lost their grip and the body could finally draw breath. The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote of fear “slinking away from Russia,” as people sensed instinctively that Stalin’s death must change things. The Kremlin doctors awaiting trial in the Lubyanka were immediately released, their coerced confessions disregarded. For the Gulag prisoners, Stalin’s death was not yet sufficient cause to grant them freedom. Another man would have to die to allow them that hope, and thousands more casualties would follow as events proceeded apace.

In the power vacuum after Stalin’s death, Lavrenty Beria held the entire machinery of repression in his hands. Several divisions of Ministry of Interior troops, brought to Moscow to supervise the funeral, were left in the city to maintain order, ready, so it appeared, for a coup. But Beria was impatient and lacked his master’s political cunning. Knowing what lay in store for them should Beria claim power, Nikita Khrushchev and the rest of the Politburo acted decisively.
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At a Central Committee meeting in July 1953, Khrushchev delivered a speech in front of a shocked Beria, accusing him of crimes against the state. In a carefully planned maneuver, a buzzer was pressed under the table and ten armed men burst into the room, seizing the most feared man in the Soviet Union. Apparently spontaneously, a Politburo bodyguard then stepped forward to inform them that Beria had raped his twelve-year-old stepdaughter. It was a common accusation made against the secret police chief, who was known to cruise the streets of Moscow in his armored limousine looking for young girls to abduct. Four decades later, the workmen at the site of Beria’s former mansion at No. 28 Kacholovna Street—now the Tunisian embassy—discovered a dozen skeletons buried in the grounds.
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At his closed military trial, Beria appeared calm and insolent. Only after the death sentence was pronounced did his confidence evaporate. When he realized that his execution was to be carried out immediately, he “lost control completely.” According to General Ivan Konev, who presided over the trial, Beria “flung himself about the courtroom weeping and begging for mercy.” He was led away to a cell, where his hands were tied behind his back and attached to a hook driven into a wooden board on the wall. He tried one last time to talk his way out—“Permit me to say . . .”—but the procurator general ordered the guard to gag his mouth with a towel. An officer then stepped forward and fired a bullet through the middle of Beria’s forehead. Simultaneously across the Soviet Union, every school, library, and research archive was shut to allow staff time to tear Beria’s photograph from their collections.
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Following his arrest, army detachments stormed the Lubyanka, and Beria’s key supporters in the secret police were all detained. Those who resisted were shot in their offices. After organizing the security at Stalin’s funeral, Sergei Goglidze had been flown out to East Berlin with orders to crush the nascent democratic uprising. A Polish railroad employee working at the border reported, “The Russians have shipped about forty thousand East German men, women and children to the USSR on this line after June 17th 1953.” In Berlin, Sergei Goglidze, too, was arrested and transported back to Moscow to be executed on December 23, 1953.
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WITHIN THE CAMPS, Stalin’s and Beria’s deaths in such quick succession changed the atmosphere immediately. The prisoners began a series of mass uprisings in protest against their sentences, seizing control from their guards and killing the informers in their midst. At the Vorkuta camps, the American prisoner John Noble learned of the attempted rebellion in East Germany from hundreds of young Berliners, aged between sixteen and twenty-two, who had been added to the prisoner population. In Mine Nos. Seventeen and Eighteen, on the sides of the coal cars someone had dared to write in chalk: TO HELL WITH YOUR COAL. WE WANT FREEDOM.
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Quickly a strike spread across the one hundred thousand prisoners of Vorkuta, their demands voiced by Gureyvich, a former Soviet diplomat, who called for a reduction in sentences and freedom for the men who had already served ten years. A former Russian professor of history from Leningrad gave a speech:
“Never in the story of man has working slavery been so extensive or cruelly exploited as here in the Soviet Union—the liberator of the working class!”
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