"Jewish Case" and "Doctors' Plot"

夜中に「ロシアは今日も荒れ模様」を読み終えた。ウオトカとロシア人の話で「ソーニャの父、マルメラードフ」に触れた個所があった。「罪と罰」を先に読んでおいてよかった。

米国傾倒のユダヤ人弾圧

In 1947, the American Secretary of State, George Marshal, unveiled a massive programme of economic aid to Europe that initially sounded attractive to the shattered Imperium… Stalin soon grasped that it would resuscitated Germany and undermine his East European hegemony. Molotov initially favoured the Plan and still leaned towards a negotiated settlement but Stalin rejected Marshall.
Stalin and Zhdanov resolved to tighten their control over Eastern Europe. Simultaneously, Stalin supported the foundation of the Jewish state, which he hoped would become a Middle Eastern satellite. On 29 November, he voted for it at the UN and was the first to recognize Israel. He gave Mikhoels the Stalin Prize. But it soon became clear Israel was going to be an American ally, not a Russian one.
[To Stalin,] Mikhoels’s dream of a Jewish Crimea became a sinister Zionist/American Trojan horse… Zionism, Judaism and America became interchangeable in Stalin’s mind… … even after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev sympathetically explained to some Polish Communists, ‘We all know Jews; they all have some connection with the capitalist world because they have relatives living abroad. This one has a granny… The Cold War began; the imperialists were plotting how to attack USSR; then the Jews want to settle in the Crimea… Trough their connections, the Jews had created a network to carry out American plans. So he squashed it all.’…
Stalin ordered Abakumov to gather evidence that Mikhoels and the Jewish Committee were ‘active nationalists oriented by the Americans to do anti-Soviet work’, especially through Mikhoels’s American trip….
Mikhoels… wanted to appeal to Stalin. He called the second most influential Jew after Kaganovich, Polina Molotova, to ask whether to appeal to Zhdanov or Malenkov.
… ‘All power in the country’s in Stalin’s hands alone and nobody can influence him... He has a negative attitude to Jews and won’t support us.’ It would have been unthinkable for her to speak in such a way before the war.
Mikhoels made the tempting but spectacularly ill-timed decision to reach Stalin through Svetlana…
Mikhoels, frantic to protect the Jewish community, asked Zhenya Alliluyeva who mixed with the Jewish intelligentsia, if he could meet Svetlana.
The Alliluyevs warned Zhenya against meddling in dangerous Jewish matters… But it seems that Zhenya did introduce Mikhoels to Svetlana and (her Jewish husband) Morozov. Stalin heard about this immediately and erupted in a rage: the Jews were ‘worming their way into the family.’… Thus Mikhoels innocently stumbled into a hornets’ nest.
Stalin ordered Abakumov to investigate the Alliluyev connection to American-Zionist espionage, muttering to Svetlana that Zhenya had poisoned her husband Pavel in 1938. Shrewd people began to divorce their Jewish spouses. Svetlana Stalin divorced Morozov….
Abakumov started to arrest the Alliluyevs’ Jewish circle. On 10 December, he arrested Zhenya Alliluyeva, once so intimate to Stalin, accusing her of ‘disseminating foul slander about the Head of the Soviet Government’. Zhenya’s husband,… her daughter Kira and Anna Redens joined her….
Svetlana tried to intervene for the ‘Aunties’ but Stalin warned her ‘they talked too much. You make anti-Soviet comments too.’ (pp. 496-499)

On his return to Moscow (from a holiday) on 21 November, [Stalin] ordered Abakumov to murder the Yiddish actor, Mikhoels. Nine days later, he supported the UN vote for the creation of Israel. (p. 508)

ミホエリス殺害

The Stalin Prize Committee sent Mikhoels to Minsk to judge plays at Belorussian theatres. When this was reported to Stalin, he verbally ordered Abakumov to murder Mikhoels on the spot….
On 12 January, Mikhoels and his friend Vladimir Golubov-Potapov, a theatre critic ad MGB agent, spent the day meeting actors, then dined at their hotel. At 8 p.m. they left the hotel to meet Golubov’s ‘friend’. Presumably the MGB car took them to [Lavrenti] Tsanava’s dacha where Mikhoels was probably injected with poison to stun him… Perhaps he fought back… He was smashed on the temple with a blunt object and shot too. Golubov, the duplicitous bystander, was killed as well. The bodies were then driven into town, run over with a truck and left in the snow.
Stalin was informed of the killings probably before the bodies have been dumped in the street… [According to Svetlana] ‘Someone was reporting to him and he listened. Then to sum up, he said, “Well, a car accident,”… it was not a question, it was a confirmation… he… said, ‘Mikhoels was killed in a car accident.’
… out of the public eye, Mikhoels murderer, Tsanava, received the Order of Lenin ‘for exemplary execution of a special assignment from the Government’. Zhenya Alliluyeva was sentenced to ten years, her daughter Kira to five years, ‘for supplying information about the personal life of [Stalin’s] family to the American Embassy’. Anna Redens also got five years. They were placed in solitary confinement.
The MGB now started to build a case against Deputy Foreign Minister Solomon Lozovsky and other prominent Jews: Polina Molotova was quietly sacked from her job…. (pp. 509-511)

「ドクターズ・プロット」の始まり

Chosen by Stalin, growing closer to Svetlana and, at twenty-eight, Head of the CC Science Department, Yury Zhdanov… took his science seriously… Yury resented the absurd dominance of Trofim Lysenko in the field of genetics…
On 10 April, 1948, young Zhdanov attacked Lysenko’s so-called creative Darwinism, and his suppression of scientists and their ideas, in a speech at the Moscow Polytechnic… Malenkov sent the lecture to Stalin [who] read [it] with mounting disdain….
… On 10 June, Stalin held one of his set-piece humiliation sessions in the Little Corner….
‘How did anyone dare insult Comrade Lysenko?’ ‘Who authorized it?’
… [D.T.] Shepilov (a Zhdanov protégé) stood up to admit:
‘The decision was mine, Comrade Stalin.’
… ‘We’ll set up a committee to clarify all the facts. The guilty must be punished. Not Yury Zhdanov, he’s still young,’ [Stalin] pointed his pipe at ‘the Pianist’: ‘It’s necessary to punish the fathers.’…
The humiliation worsened Zhdanov’s health: he must have wished he had emulated the Berias and Malenkovs who kept their children far from politics.
In June, Zhdanov, back from Bucharest, suffered another cardiac crisis and a minor stroke… On 1 July, Stalin replaced Zhdanov with his nemesis, Malenkov, as Second Secretary… … now desperately ill, Zhdanov could no longer perform his duties….
Stalin, recalls Yury, ‘became worried. Father’s illness caused a change in the balance of power….
Zhdanov’s obvious symptoms of arteriosclerosis and heart failure were misdiagnosed… On 29 August, he had another severe attack… Dr Lydia Timashuk, the cardiographer, diagnosed a (heart attack), and she was almost certainly right, but the distinguished professors made her rewrite her report…
Timashuk denounced her superiors and had Zhdanov’s chief bodyguard deliver the letter to General Vlasik to give personally to Stalin. When nothing happened, Timashuk, an MGB agent, wrote to the secret police. Abakumov forwarded the letter to Stalin that same day. Stalin signed it, wrote ‘Into the archive’, but did nothing….
On the 31st, [Zhdanov]… died of a massive coronary… The professors were terrified that their misdiagnosis and cover-up would be exposed so they sacked and denounced Timashuk who then wrote more damning letters to Stalin and Kuznetsov, MGB curator. But this time, Vlasik did not deliver the letter and Kuznetsov ignored his.
Timashuk became the villainess of the Doctors’ Plot because her letters were later used by Stalin but this was ironic since she was medically correct. Zhdanov may have been mistreated but the rumours of murder seem unlikely… If Stalin had really wanted to murder Zhdanov, it would have not have taken five heart attacks over years but a quick injection….
… Zhdanov’s illness was obviously serious and Stalin may well have been content to leave treatment to the top Kremlin doctors: beside he was irritated with Zhdanov. But at a deeper level, these medical squabbles were an opportunity for Stalin… [He] would exploit Zhdanov’s death when he was ready to create the Terror he was convinced was necessary… He was already considering the Doctors’ Plot but it would take him three years to return to Timashuk’s letters. (pp. 512-516)

外相夫人ポリーナを逮捕

… Perhaps [Polina Molotova] did not know how Stalin resented her pushy intelligence, snobbish elegance, Jewish background, American businessman brother and, as he told Svetlana, ‘bad influence on Nadya’. Her sacking in May was a warning but she did not know that Stalin had considered murdering her in 1939.
… On 20 November, the Politburo dismantled the Jewish Committee and unleashed an anti-Semitic terror, managed by Malenkov and Abakumov. Mikhoels’s colleagues were now arrested, together with some brilliant Jewish writers and scientist… They also arrested the father of Svetlana’s newly-divorce husband….
Stalin ordered the prisoners to be tortured to implicate Polina Molotova….
… Stalin… confronted Molotov with Polina’s guilt. ‘He and I quarrelled about it,’ said Molotov.
‘It’s time for you to divorce your wife,’ said Stalin. Molotov agreed, partly because he was a Bolshevik but partly because obedience might save the woman he loved….
Stalin ordered Malenkov and Abakumov to put together the Jewish Case….
Since its centrepiece was the plan for the Jewish Crimea, on 13 January 1949 Malenkov summoned Lozovsky, ex-overlord of the Jewish Committee, to Old Square for an interrogation. This was already a matter of life and death for Lozovsky – it also had its dangers for… Malenkov, because his eldest daughter Volya was married to the son of a Jewish official named Shamberg whose sister was married to Lozovsky.
Malenkov extricated his family from its Jewish connections. Volya Malenkova divorced Shamberg… Volya vigorously denied (Stalin ordered her divorce), claiming that the marriage had not worked because Shamberg had married her for the wrong reason – and had ‘bad artistic taste’….
As many as 110 prisoners, most of them Jews, were suffering ‘French wrestling’ at the hands of the vicious [V.I.] Komarov in the Lubianka…. The prisoners were also encouraged to implicate the Jewish magnates, Kaganovich and Mekhlis, but Polina Molotova was the true target….
Polina was expelled from the Party for ‘close relations with Jewish nationalists’ despite being warned in 1939, when Molotov had abstained on a similar vote. Now remarkably, he abstained again but sensing the gravity of the case, he buckled. ‘When the Central Committee voted on the proposal to expel PS Zhemchuzhina… I abstained which I acknowledge to be politically incorrect,’ he wrote to Stalin on 20 January 1949….
On 21 January, Polina was arrested in her squirrel-fur coat. Her sisters, doctor and secretaries were arrested. One of her sisters and a brother would die in prison….
Many believed she was dead but Beria, who played little part in the Jewish Case, knew better from his contacts. ‘Polina’s ALIVE!’ he whispered to Molotov at Politburo meetings.
Stalin now excluded Molotov from the highest echelons… However he still trusted Mikoyan just enough to end [him] on a secret mission to size up Mao Tse-tung who was about to complete his conquest of China.
On his return, Mikoyan found a shock awaiting him. Stalin sacked Molotov and Mikoyan as Foreign and Foreign Trade Ministers, though both remained Deputy Premiers. Then he accused Mikoyan of breaking official secrecy about his Chinese trip. Mikoyan had only told his son Stepan: ‘Did you tell anyone about my Chinese trip?’ he asked him.
‘Svetlana,’ replied Stepan. (pp. 519-524)

「レニングラード・ケース」。ヴォズネセンスキーとクズネツォフの失脚

… Stalin himself was always ready to scythe down the tallest poppies – those gifted Leningraders – to maintain his own paramountcy. Stalin’s heir apparent as Premier, Nikolai Voznesensky… [at] forty-four, the youngest Politburo member distinguished himself as a brilliant planner who enjoyed an unusually honest relationship with Stalin. Rude to his colleagues, no one made so many enemies as Voznesensky. Now his patron Zhdanov was dead, his enemy Malenkov resurgent… Voznesensky’s arrogance and Stalin’s touchiness made him vulnerable.
During 1948, Stalin noticed that production rose in the last quarter of the year but dipped in the first quarter. This was a normal seasonal variation but Stalin asked Voznesensky to level it out… [H]e failed to do so and, afraid of Stalin, he concealed the statistics. Somehow this legerdemain was leaked to Beria who discovered that hundreds of secret Gosplan documents had gone missing….
… Beria then revealed the damning secret about Voznesensky that he had treasured even since 1941: during Stalin’s breakdown, Voznesensky had told Molotov,
‘Vyacheslav, go forward, we’ll follow you!’ That betrayal clinched it. Andreyev… was brought in to investigate… Sacked from the Politburo on 7 March 1949, he spent his days at his Granovsky flat writing economics treatise. Once again, that dreaded duo, Malenkov and Abakumov, took over the Gosplan Case.
The other anointed heir apparent [Kuznetsov]… made the mistake of examining old MGB files on Kirov’s murder and the show trials. Kuznetsov’s blundering into such sensitive matters aroused Stalin’s suspicions.
Simultaneously, Malenkov alerted Stalin that the Leningrad Party had covered up a voting scandal and held a trade fair without Government permission. He managed to connect these sins with a vague plan mooted by Zhdanov to create Russian (as opposed to a Soviet) Party alongside the Soviet one and make Leningrad the Russian capital… Beside, a Russian Party could not be led by a Georgian. Stalin championed the Russian people as the binding force of the USSR but he remained an internationalist. Voznesensky’s nationalism worried the Caucasians… Beria must have worried his future under the Leningraders.
… Malenkov attacked the [Leningrad] bosses, stringing together disparate strands into one lethal conspiracy. The arrest began, but Voznesensky and Kuznetsov [were] convinced that Stalin would forgive them: 1937 seemed a long time ago. Even Mikoyan thought blood-letting was a thing of the past.
… [Stalin] ordered to arrest, torture and destroy the Leningraders who had only recently been his anointed successors.
On 13 August, Kuznetsov was summoned to Malenkov’s office. ‘I’ll be back,’ he told his wife and son Valery. ‘Don’t start supper without me.’… He was arrested by Malenkov’s bodyguard.
Yet Stalin hesitated about Voznesensky… The ailing but drear Andreyev exposed all manner of ‘disorders in this organization’: 526 documents had gone missing from Gosplan. The invented case was one of Andreyev’s last achievements. Voznesensky admitted that ‘… I was guilty.’…
Four months later, Voznesensky was arrested in this sweep of Zhdanovites, joining Kuznetsov and 214 other prisoners…. (pp. 525-530)

最初の核実験

The Leningrad Case was not Beria’s only success: just after Kuznetsov’s arrest in late August 1949. Beria set out in a special armoured train for a secret nuclear settlement amidst the Kazakh steppes….
Beria arrived in Semipalatinsk-21 for the test of the ‘article’. He moved into a tiny cabin beside Professor Kurchatov’s command post….
At 6 p.m. (on 29 August)… Kurchatov ordered detonation. There was a bright flash….
… Four years after Hiroshima, Stalin had the Bomb. (p. 531)

Stalin summoned Khrushchev from Kiev. ‘I couldn’t help but feel anxious,’ he admitted, when Kuznetsov and Voznesensky were being tortured. He called Malenkov who comforted him:
‘Don’t worry. I can’t tell you why you’ve been called but I promise you’ve got nothing to fear.’….
Stalin appointed Khrushchev CC Secretary and Moscow boss but confided, ‘… We’ve exposed a conspiracy in Leningrad. And Moscow’s teeming with anti-Party elements.’ He wanted Khrushchev to check it out. (p. 532)