Purge of the Purger

RUSSIA Purge of the Purger (See Cover)

Down Sadovaya Boulevard, a wide, busy thoroughfare in north Moscow, sped a detachment of Soviet tanks and truckloads of soldiers. The time was 5 p.m., the day June 27. Such sights are rare in Moscow, and foreign diplomats noted the movement with interest.

At the Bolshoi Theater in Sverdlov Square that evening, the great red and gold curtain rang up on a new opera called The Decembrists, a propaganda piece about a rising of military officers in 1825, at the outset of Czar Nicholas I's reign. The Soviet Union's finest vocalists were on the stage, but opera was not the evening's sensation. Glancing towards the great state box, which dominates the glittering dress circle of the Bolshoi, the audience saw that it was impressively occupied. Sitting there, impassive, iron-mouthed, unsmiling, were the supreme leaders of the Soviet Union, some in the dark cloth of civilian office, others brilliantly bemedaled.

The unannounced appearance of the Soviet leaders at the Bolshoi was one of their rare public demonstrations of solidarity since the death of Stalin. Counting the heads, the audience found one missing; the cruel, slyly epicene face of Lavrenty Beria, first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, chief of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (police), boss of atomic energy, was not among those in the state box. Next morning, Moscow newspapers reported the visit of the great to the Bolshoi and carefully listed the twelve leaders present. The name of Beria was not mentioned; there was no explanation of his conspicuous absence.

Foreign ambassadors, including the U.S.'s Charles Bohlen (who had been denied ..admittance to the performance), passed the news on to their governments; foreign correspondents filed briefly. Rumors about Beria ran round Moscow, but there were no hard facts. Some recalled that Beria lives with his family in the posh Sadovaya district, in the direction the tanks headed--but so do many other Soviet leaders. U.S. Ambassador Bohlen asked Washington for vacation leave, and flew off to Paris, on the way to Majorca.

Behind the Scenes. Unknown to the foreigners at the time, and to all but a few Russians, a plenary session of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party was held ten days later, somewhere in Moscow. On this committee sit Russia's 200 mightiest Communists, men with great rank and great fears. They gathered to hear the most significant news since Stalin's death 93 days before: the struggle for power among the Kremlin's titans had begun.

It was suety Georgy Malenkov, the Premier, who got to his feet before them, to put the finger on Comrade Beria. This trusted man, said Malenkov, had committed "criminal anti-party and anti-state actions, intended to undermine the Soviet State in the interest of foreign capital." How had his criminality been manifested? In "perfidious attempts to place the U.S.S.R. Ministry of Internal Affairs above the government and the Communist Party."

The power to make the charge was the power to make it stick. Did any of these feared and fearing men challenge Malenkov, demand to know what evidence there was to sustain so grave a charge, or rise to Comrade Beria's defense? The subsequent communique said only that the Central Committee had decided to expel Beria from the party as "an enemy of the people."

A few days later, the 33-man Presidium of the Supreme Soviet met, formally removed Beria from his state and ministerial jobs, and ordered him to trial before the Soviet supreme court. The charge: treason.

The Wolves. None of this was made public at the time; but on July 6, the day before the Central Committee's meeting, the government newspaper Izvestia curtly remarked that a Soviet leader, who was not paying proper attention to Communist theory, was going to find his days of authority numbered.

The public naming of names waited for a meeting of the Moscow district of the Communist Party last week. In the marble Hall of Columns in the House of Unions, once a nobleman's club, 2,000 party members heard Nikolai Mikhailov, Moscow district party leader, read out the communiques of the Plenum and the Presidium. One of Communism's great wolves had fallen, and the lesser wolves were tearing at his carcass. Reported Tass: "Speakers at the meeting spoke in wrathful indignation of the foul enemy of the party and the Soviet people--the international imperialist agent Beria," and the audience cheered.

The official party newspaper Pravda laid down the indictment: Beria 1) had been using the MVD (secret police) "against the party and its leadership and against the government ... by selecting workers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of personal loyalty to himself"; 2) had "impeded decisions on the most important and urgent problems concerning agriculture . . . with a view to undermining the collective farms and creating difficulty in the country's food supply"; 3) had striven "to activize bourgeois nationalist elements in the Union republics."

The Fac,ade. Pravda's accusation, appearing 13 days after the tanks rumbled down Sadovaya, brought the first news to the Russian public. In Moscow, long lines of people formed at the newspaper kiosks; some paused to read their newspapers in the street, which is unusual in Moscow. Others crowded around the wall newspapers. Then they went stoically about their business. It was a warm, sunny day. Moscovites who were not working went picnicking, and the swimming places on the Moskva River were crowded. Moscow's crack Torpedo soccer team played the Kiev Dynamos, lost 3 to 1. The diplomatic corps met at the Argentine embassy for evening cocktails, chatted amiably with Andrei Vishinsky, who had been summoned from his Long Island mansion at the end of May. To prepare a new purge trial? Diplomats wondered, but, of course, no one put the question to smiling, casual-seeming Prosecutor Vishinsky.

The news of Beria's downfall reached the outside world in a dawn broadcast from Radio Moscow, followed by an official Tass announcement. Then the speculations began. PURGE DECIDES POWER BATTLE FOR MALENKOV, headlined the Detroit News; MOLOTOV RISES AS PURGE PERILS MALENKOV, headlined the New York World-Telegram, which later front-paged,

BERIA FALL OPENS NEW POSSIBILITIES FOR WORLD PEACE. Said the New York News: BERIA'S BOOTING COULD MEAN WAR--GRUENTHER. Warned the good grey New York Times: NO CHANGE IN POLICY SEEN. Diplomats the world over interpreted the event in the light of their own problems. Said Secretary of State John Foster Dulles: "A new convulsion is under way . . . Inherent weakness is disclosed." British Foreign Under Secretary Anthony Nutting called it "the dividend of our strength." In Bonn, Adenauer's rivals saw Beria's fall giving them an edge in the coming elections. In Yugoslavia, Tito's henchmen saw it as proof "that the Kremlin was introducing Titoism into the satellites." In India, Beria's fall was seen as justifying Nehru's thesis that Peking cannot be controlled by Moscow forever.

The Real Stage. Foreign comment, even in the Communist press, measured the event in terms of its possible effect on foreign policy; but the real stage and the most important audience was the Soviet Union. The reason for the delay in announcing Beria's arrest was soon apparent: the masses had to be prepared. Mass meetings were now being held throughout the Soviet Union. Pravda in hand, party workers and activists were haranguing the workers and peasants. Lesser party members quickly picked up the line. Said the director of Moscow's Hammer & Sickle factory: "We . . . demand that the severe hand of Soviet justice should mercilessly punish this freak deviationist." Said girl Plasterer Tamara Demicheva in Evening Moscow: "It was with enormous indignation and wrath that we, the youth of the University construction project, learned of the repulsive activities of the despised hireling of foreign people."

But Associated Press Correspondent Eddy Gilmore, just out of Moscow after a twelve-year stint, had a more realistic picture of Russian feeling: "It is as clear as the face on the Kremlin clock that throughout the Communist world tonight party members from the highest to the lowest feel the terrible hand of political terror clutching at their necks. The enormity of Mr. Beria's disgrace is an inescapable reminder that, but for fate, they might be sitting where he is."

Where was Beria sitting? Said Gilmore: "Unless the formula has been changed, Beria, high chieftain of the Soviet secret police, sits in one of his own cells in Lubianka prison . . . Oddly enough, that is where Mr. Beria has his own office. I have seen him entering and leaving many times. He would get out of his black car and, with policemen on either side and others leading the way and bringing up the rear, disappear into the depths of the place." Where were Beria's bodyguards on June 27? Was he indeed still alive? What was the meaning of his arrest, and what would be its effect? There were more good questions than good answers. But something of what went on could be measured by a look at Beria's position and actual powers.

Grand Guignol. Joseph Stalin had no friends, but there were always sycophants around him, and the longest-lived of all of them was Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria. Like Stalin, Beria was born in the Transcaucasian state of Georgia. The record says that he came of a poor peasant family in the Sukhum region. At 18, he became a member of the Russian Social Democratic (Bolshevik) Party. He worked underground, was jailed by the post-Czarist government of Azerbaijan, released on the plea of Russian Ambassador Kirov, after which he joined the Cheka (secret police) and took an active part in overthrowing the governments of the Transcaucasian republics and their forcible incorporation in the Soviet Union.

In many details, Beria's official origins run parallel with those of Stalin, a coincidence historians regard with suspicion, for it was as a faker of history that Beria first came to Stalin's favorable notice. In 1935, Beria wrote a pamphlet glorifying Stalin as the hero of the Bolshevik struggle in Transcaucasia. False in almost all of its particulars, it made Stalin a hero without fear and without reproach, provided many phony arguments against Trotsky and other factions opposed to Stalin's extension of personal power.

Beria's benefactor, Kirov, had been sensationally murdered about this time, and the Soviet Union was on the verge of a political bloodbath. The instrument of the purge set off by the Kirov assassination was Genrikh Yagoda, a leather-capped roughneck who was then head of NKVD (successor to the Cheka). Yagoda did a thorough job and, in due time, he got his reward: he was charged, like thousands of his victims, with being an enemy of the people, imperialist spy, etc. Yagoda was the third of the great cops, following Felix Dzerzhinsky, the lean, cat-eyed Polish aristocrat, who lies buried in the Kremlin wall, and Vyacheslav Menshinsky, another Pole, who invented the great show trials of 1936 (Vishinsky prosecuting) and was himself later done in.

Yagoda, showpiece at a great public trial, confessed (after due treatment in Lubianka) that he had planned a "palace coup," but denied that he was an imperialist spy. In court he cracked: "If I had been a spy, dozens of countries could have closed down their intelligence services--there would have been no need for them to have maintained such a mass of spies." He was executed, and replaced by Nikolai Yezhov, a madman who carried on the slaughter to the point where millions of Russians were dead or jailed. Yezhov, often styled "the beloved pupil of our leader and teacher Stalin," had his own group of pupils, among them a fat, pallid young man named Georgy Malenkov. After two years in office, Yezhov disappeared. His successor: Lavrenty Beria.

Benevolent Exterior. With his pince-nez and some carefully cultivated propaganda about his being a pianist and a profound student of architecture, Beria brought an air of respectability to the secret police, which had become almost unmentionable, so greatly was it feared. The whole apparatus of the NKVD was reorganized. Thousands were released from the prisons and the story put about that this was Stalin's (and Beria's) clemency, and that the real instigators of the purge had been Yagoda and Yezhov. Beneath this relatively benevolent exterior, Beria turned the NKVD into the most ruthless and extensive police organization the world has ever known.

It was Beria who expanded the slave camps and exploited the labor of prisoners in the interest of the state, a system which developed to the point where, cautious students of Russia estimate, not less than 15 million people are forcibly engaged. He also developed the military arm of the NKVD, creating a force of something like 15 divisions of elite troops, resembling Hitler's SS. He extended the system of informers to embrace every institution, factory, farm and, indeed, every building in the Soviet Union. Within the party itself he had spies watching spies, reporting back to the NKVD and through him to Stalin. His operatives followed Trotsky to Mexico, killed him there. When Germany attacked Russia, Beria's police system was Stalin's organizational strength. Stalin made him one of the five members of the State Defense Committee (the others: Stalin, Malenkov, Molotov, Voroshilov), and Lavrenty Beria was at last in the very top Soviet leadership. After the war, as the fortunes of Malenkov and Molotov fluctuated, and Voroshilov showed signs of age, the legend grew that Beria was the man closest to Stalin, his most trusted confidant and, protector.

Political Farce. Stalin put him in charge of Soviet atomic development. His great contributions: 1) information gathered by his spies in the U.S. and Britain from Fuchs, May, Pontecorvo, the Rosenbergs, et al.; 2) uranium mined by his prisoners and impressed workmen in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and, probably, Arctic Siberia. While the Cominform's Andrei Zhdanov was making the most noise about eastern Europe, Beria quietly stepped down from his police job (now a full ministry, the MVD) and took over the organization of the satellite countries, the consolidation of the Soviet Union's own republics.

Under his direction, whole populations were moved from the border areas to regions deeper in Russia. The great prison administrations of central Siberia took in millions of foreign deportees, then dispersed them to distant parts of the Soviet Union, later--with the characteristic switch to benevolence--parceling them back to their own countries. The countries were often grateful. It was a technique Stalin and Beria had learned through experience. Then he returned to the MVD and became Minister of Internal Affairs.

Beria gained the reputation of being an icily cold political boss, an intellectual. But there is nothing in any of his speeches or writings to suggest more than a mediocre mind. He played stooge to Stalin's grim sense of the comic. At a dinner in which Stalin sat between Tito and Beria, Stalin turned to Tito and asked: "How many people did you kill in your revolution?" While Tito was fumbling for words, Stalin turned to Beria: "And how many did you kill in our revolution?" Said Beria calmly: "Three million."

Though a marshal of the Soviet Union, he seldom wore a uniform and he usually stood a step or two to the rear in public gatherings, a stout man with a flat hat pulled down over cold, darting eyes. On his 50th birthday (in 1949), he was awarded an Order of Lenin, with a citation as fulsome in its praise of him as he had so often been in praise of Stalin, concluding: "We wish you, our comrade in arms, our dear Lavrenty Pavlovich, many years of health, of further fruitful work." He was probably the second most hated man in the Soviet Union.

The first hint that all was not well with Lavrenty Beria was the arrest last January of nine Moscow physicians on charges of having brought about the death of Cominform Director Andrei Zhdanov (in 1948) and Sovinform Boss Alexei Shcherbakov (in 1945) and of plotting to destroy Soviet leaders, meaning--although he was not named--Stalin. The Ministry of Internal Affairs was held to have been culpable. For a while it looked as though Beria might follow Yagoda and Yezhov.

Contracting Power. Stalin, who may have been sufficiently troubled by ill health, and thoughts of his own death, to believe the story about the Kremlin doctors and assent to their arrest, died on March 5. Five months before, at the 19th Communist Party Congress (called suddenly--the first in 13 years), he had set up his succession. He spread the power: the twelve-man Politburo was replaced by a 25-man Presidium, the 71-man Central Committee widened to take in 125 full members and in nonvoting members. The day after Stalin's death an official announcement reduced the Presidium to ten, with five alternates. A few weeks later a new party and state organization, narrower than that planned by Stalin, took shape. As Premier and chairman of the Presidium of the Central Committee, Malenkov was nominally boss of the party and government.

In his funeral oration over Stalin's bier, Malenkov announced "a policy of international cooperation and development of business relations with all countries, a policy based on the . . . possibility of the prolonged coexistence and peaceful competition of two different systems, capitalist and socialist." Beria in his funeral oration promised that "the government will solicitously and incessantly guard [the people's] rights written in the Stalin Constitution," urged "an intensification of vigilance" against enemies who hope that "the heavy loss inflicted on us will lead to disarray and confusion."

Then followed the succession of carefully controlled gestures of easing up: 1) an amnesty, signed by Voroshilov, for short-term prisoners; 2) foreigners held in Soviet prisons on espionage counts were released; 3) retail prices were reduced on 125 categories of consumer goods; 4) the Ministry of Internal Affairs announced that the doctors' plot was a frame-up, freed the doctors who had been unjustly tortured; 5) a year-long purge in Georgia was ended with the appointment of a new Premier and new party secretaries; 6) the Communists in Korea announced that they were ready to make important concessions to get a truce; 7) in Austria and in East Germany there was a switch from military to civilian control; 8) the unexpected and damaging June 17 riots in East Germany were followed by confession of error and a promise to make life easier for East Germany; 9) in Latvia and the Ukraine, Communist Party shake-ups took place.

The Extent of Power. Because many of these events involved police action, or its withdrawal, they were attributed by foreign observers to Beria. But if the charges made against him last week are to be accepted, it would seem now that Beria's activity was restricted to the shake-ups in Georgia, Latvia and the Ukraine and the freeing of the doctors. The fact that the general "softening" of Soviet policy has continued since his arrest (including the most sweeping relaxation of all, in Hungary) would indicate that he was not its author. Was he against it? The answer is immaterial. There is nothing in the record, or in the accusations against Beria, to indicate that his fall resulted from anything but a power struggle within the Kremlin.

The liberties and favors showered on Beria by Stalin created the impression among outsiders that Beria was all-powerful in his Ministry of Internal Affairs. But an old killer like Stalin was not the kind of man to turn over such power to another. Evidently, a super-police apparatus channeled directly from Stalin to key control points in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Such an apparatus was already created in the Orgburo and the Party Control Commission, by which Stalin organized himself into power after Lenin's death, and which later became a department of personnel in the Kremlin. Only such an apparatus could have arrested and destroyed former police chief Yagoda. From being dossier clerk to Yezhov, the young Malenkov is said to have graduated to secretarial head of this tidy personnel department. He may well have inherited the apparatus after Stalin's death.

Sensing that his number was up, and knowing that no Soviet police boss has ever outlived his job, Beria may have maneuvered himself, may have tried to build himself a citadel in Georgia, or even to have effected arrests among top party members. No outsider can yet judge how extensive was his control in his ministry, except that it was not sufficient to protect him. That a detachment of tanks and soldiers probably backed up the arresting officers does not necessarily indicate army interest; his own elite secret police formations have that much armor. Beria at the key moment could not control his own ministry. Malenkov was emerging as the actual, as well as the nominal, head of party and state.

Who in the Ministry of Internal Affairs prepared Beria's arrest? If the tradition of the service holds, it may well have been his successor: clam-faced Colonel General Sergei Nikiforovich Kruglov, long a liaison man between the ministry and the Kremlin. At Yalta and Potsdam, Kruglov set up the protection screen which surrounded the Big Three,--was one of the very few who had free access to Stalin's quarters. At the San Francisco Conference, turned out in a blue serge suit and broad-toed shoes, he was Molotov's bodyguard. Although Kruglov's police career dates from 1938, the year Beria took over, and he has always appeared to be a Beria man, the" Central Committee Presidium (Malenkov) was clearly in no doubt about where his loyalty lay, although Beria may have been.

In Pravda's chilling announcement, in which the words "the great Stalin" were mentioned only in the concluding paragraph, Malenkov's name was mentioned not at all. The fiction of anonymity persists. Great play was made with another phrase: "The collectivity of leadership is the highest principle of the leadership of our party [and] corresponds to the well-known statement of Marx on the harm of . . . the cult of personality." To which a skeptical reader of Russian rhetoric might answer: "All leaderships are collective, but some leaderships are less collective than others."

Ambitious Patience. By "democratic centralism" within the Communist Party, Lenin had hoped--not very optimistically in his last days--to prevent a continuance of a personal dictatorship like his own. Rising to power by subterfuge and maneuver, Stalin destroyed every man of stature within his reach, at the same time paying vociferous lip service to "democratic centralism." Those he gathered around him, conditioning themselves to his homicidal suspicion, were small men, menials like Molotov, sycophants like Beria. Conscious of this, Stalin looked for successors among young party members, built them up to temporary power and fame, as often knocked them down. Such a man was Georgy Malenkov--with a difference. More subtle than the others, possibly more intelligent, he learned how to wait, how to accept demotion and be silent ; learned, in fact, the lesson of Stalin's own ambitious, patient youth.

There is some reason to believe that Malenkov may have fallen out of Stalin's favor in recent years; but it was already too late for the old dictator to choose and train a younger man. Had he calculated, in his last frantic seeking for a successor who would not throw away all he had won, on a balance of power? Was that what was meant by "collectivity of leadership"? In the milieu of bloody totalitarianism--his own creation--such an arrangement seemed like the product of a failing mind. Nothing was to keep so smart and faithful a student of the Stalinist method as Georgy Malenkov from eliminating one, two or ten thousand men in his way.

In all the millions of words of speculation about Beria's fall, some of the most cautious and sensible were to be found in a British intelligence appraisal prepared for Prime Minister Churchill. Its conclusion: the rule of oligarchy in Russia (i.e., "collective leadership") is disintegrating; the struggle for power is between bosses, not between clear-cut factions like the party and the police. The police apparatus, which survived the destruction of previous bosses, is now in Malenkov's hands.

In India, a Hindu politico put it more vividly: "Whenever a great Mogul ascended to the throne in ancient India, he killed all his brothers and cousins because of fear that they might challenge his position. Russia's rulers are only following this bloody custom. Malenkov has begun the massacre of all Stalin's potential heirs."

*And thereby won the U.S. Legion of Merit and the Order of the British Empire.

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