Moscow Nights Read online

  The doctors presented their reports, and the horse trading began. As the day wore on, it continued in whispers by the deathbed and back in the Kremlin that night.

  For one moment on the morning of the fourth, Stalin seemed to regain consciousness. He gestured to a magazine clipping, a picture of a little girl feeding a lamb from a horn, and pointed to himself. “He sort of smiled,” Khrushchev thought. Iron Butt Molotov saw a flash of the old self-deprecating wit. Beria, who had begun venting his pent-up hatred of Stalin, rushed over, dropped to his knees, and kissed Stalin’s hand. Then, when the Boss sank again, Beria shot him a look of scorn and disgust. Svetlana caught it and thought Beria a monster. Once, Beria had dandled her on his knee; now she saw his flabby, sickly face “twisted by ambition, cruelty, cunning and a lust for power . . . He was a magnificent modern specimen of the artful courtier, the embodiment of Oriental perfidy, flattery and hypocrisy who had succeeded in confounding even my father.”

  Later in the day, the patient worsened again. That night, three of the “poisoner-doctors” were summoned from their cells in the Lubyanka. “Which specialist would you recommend for one of our most important people who has just had a stroke?” their torturers asked them. The doctors suggested several experts who were in prison and dismissed most of those at Stalin’s side as incompetents, which put their interlocutors in a delicate position.

  The following morning, Stalin paled, shook, and vomited blood. His breath came slow and shallow. Beria rushed back to the Boss’s office, opened his safe, and searched for documents that might incriminate him and his cronies. As he expected, many of the files contained denunciations and evidence against him, Khrushchev, Malenkov, and others, including interrogation papers already filled out with answers. Systematically he began to destroy them.

  Shortly before 10:00 p.m., Stalin’s features twisted, and he began choking to death. One last time, he opened his eyes and with an awful look raised his left hand, pointing upward, perhaps trying to shake his finger or claw for air. Svetlana thought he was bringing a curse down on them all. Then he was gone.

  A brawny medic began rhythmically pumping the dictator’s chest. “Listen, please stop that!” Khrushchev spoke up from by the door. “The man is dead. What do you want? To bring him back to life?”

  The leaders lined up in pairs to kiss the body. Most, even those whose lives had been on the line under Stalin, were crying. Beria, who went first, was glowing.

  Silence fell. Then Beria barged out, shouting to the chief guard with immodest urgency, “Khrustalev, the car!”

  “He’s off to take power,” Mikoyan said to Khrushchev. A great dealmaker like many of his fellow Armenians, Mikoyan was famous among the leaders for his glistening shrewdness.

  The others lingered for a moment. Then, in a frenzy, they rushed all at once for the door.

  TWO DAYS later, just after the 1:00 a.m. news, radio receivers tuned to Moscow emitted a strange spluttering sound followed by a flat drone. Somber orchestral music struck up and played in place of the usual hourly bulletins and the early-morning exercise class and political lecture. Suddenly it stopped, and after a delay bells pealed out. Another silence was broken by the soaring strains of the Soviet national anthem, which during the Second World War Stalin had substituted for “The Internationale.”

  Finally, a familiar voice came on, the same voice that had brought news of wartime victories, thick with emotion. The heart of Joseph Vissarionovich, the collaborator and follower of the genius of Lenin’s work, the wise leader and teacher of the Communist Party and the Soviet people, had stopped beating. However heavy the blow, the nation was steely in its unity under the beloved fraternal family led by the party, the correctness of whose policies had been proven time and again. It would rise to new successes and crush foreign aggressors. After the usual pieties about peace, the voice concluded with a variation on the old line on the death of kings, with the Communist Party in place of the eternal crown.

  It was an unnatural family that rewarded children if they orphaned themselves by accusing their parents of thought crimes, and an unnatural father who beamed down from the icy walls of labor camp orphanages, cradling a little girl whose parents had died in the Terror above the slogan “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for a happy childhood.” Yet many, perhaps most, Soviets believed that the millions arrested under Stalin had been guilty of something. They believed it because they loved and worshipped Stalin as much as they feared him. For three decades they had woken up with his name on their lips, and their children had gone to school singing songs in his praise. His statue towered over squares and strode before public buildings. His bust was in every airport, train station, bus station, and schoolroom; his portrait in every room of every museum and draped stories high on buildings during celebrations. Workers went to their factory or collective farm proud that it bore his name, and went home to streets, towns, and cities renamed in his honor. Greatest of all was Stalingrad, which had bled and nearly died for him during the worst of all wars but had never surrendered. He had led them to victory, and even when it unaccountably yielded more terror, many of his victims had extolled him as they died. Now he was gone, and millions wept for the Guiding Light of Communism, the Genius Leader of Progressive Mankind, the man they had called God.

  It was hard to imagine such a man dying of natural causes, and rumors spread that his deputies and doctors had done away with him: perhaps because of his rumored plan to deport Moscow’s Jews and start another Terror, or perhaps because powerful figures had begun to worry that Stalin’s belief in the inevitability of war with the West would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course there were less principled possibilities, too. Age and absolute power had recently made Stalin more dangerous than ever: sterile inside and morbidly suspicious, jittery and unpredictable. “I’m finished,” he once told Khrushchev and Mikoyan in a moment of candor. “I don’t even trust myself.” So long as he was alive, even the most powerful potentates were all, as Khrushchev said, temporary people. Both Mikoyan and Molotov, whose wife Stalin had sent to the Gulag, stood accused of spying and were an inch from the noose. Even Beria was waiting for the deathblow. Perhaps they had been afraid to call in the doctors sooner, lest the Boss accuse them of plotting murder. Perhaps they had delayed calling them to hasten the end. Or, just possibly, someone had been brave enough to slip a slow-acting poison into Stalin’s light Georgian wine.

  The theories multiplied, but already there was a more pressing question on everyone’s lips. “Our father is dead,” they said. “What will we do now?”

  SVIATOSLAV RICHTER, the Soviet Union’s greatest pianist, was on tour in Georgia when he received a telegram requiring his immediate return to Moscow. Owing to atrocious weather, the usual flights were full, and the thirty-seven-year-old Richter, who was impervious to fear but hated flying anyway, shared a plane with hundreds of wreaths sent as a tribute to the Georgian-born dictator. Soon after takeoff, the storm worsened and the funereal plane was forced to land at Sukhumi, on the Black Sea, where Richter spent an uncomfortable night before flying on to Moscow in the morning.

  In the capital the newspapers were heavily edged in black, and the radio was broadcasting back-to-back requiems. The Metro and shops were shut, and the brightly colored trams bore green wreaths. The streets were filled with hundreds of thousands of mourners, many sobbing or holding Stalin’s portrait aloft like a holy icon, heading for the House of Unions, near the Kremlin. As more poured in, those at the front were crushed against the security trucks ringing the building. “Save me!” they screamed as they were trampled underfoot. As many as two thousand died: the last victims of the twisted genius who had turned the Bolshevik system of government by fear into a personal cult of death.

  Like the rest of the city center, the House of Unions was decked with black-bordered red flags at half-mast. In the building’s former incarnation as the Nobles’ Club, the gold-and-white Columned Hall, with its two-tiered chandeliers, had been the focal point of Moscow’s wintertim
e marriage market. Here Lenin had lain in state, and during the show trials, Stalin had puffed on his pipe behind a screen while his rivals accused themselves of incredible crimes. Now he was laid out amid clumps of palm trees and banks of flowers, a Plexiglas dome displaying his embalmed face like an iced cake under a glass cloche. A full symphony orchestra, a quartet, and the celebrated violinist David Oistrakh were already in position. Richter took his place at an upright piano positioned directly beneath the coffin. When he stepped on the pedals, they clonked uselessly to the floor. There was a pile of scores nearby, and he asked an orchestra member to help him wedge them underneath. As they bent down, plainclothes agents started running along the gallery. “They think I’m planting a bomb,” he realized, and pedals or no pedals, he sat down to plunk out the slow movement from Bach’s D Minor Concerto.

  For two days the musicians played nonstop in an icy draft as policemen propelled the crowds through at such a rate that it felt as if the hall were a continuation of the street. Richter glanced sideways and idly wondered if the people had come to check that Stalin was really dead. For his part, he was supremely indifferent. During the war, his German father was arrested on the usual trumped-up charges of spying and was executed by firing squad, in a garbage dump, along with twenty-three others, but Richter mostly blamed his mother, who refused to leave town because her lover had moved in with them and who afterward ran off with him, never to be heard from since. Otherwise, he treated the regime as a nuisance to be ignored whenever possible.

  Outside, on Pushkinskaya, thousands were still shuffling along. It was nearly midnight, and Stalin’s corpse was due to be removed. Malenkov, the favorite, turned up looking scared stiff. “Ha ha! There’s someone who’s afraid he’ll be killed,” thought the pianist. The orchestra had come to the end of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no. 6, the great withdrawing hymn written days before the composer’s death, and it started again from the beginning. At the worst moment, a military band outside began honking Chopin’s “Funeral March,” and to Richter’s disgust, the symphony fell apart.

  The pallbearers heaved the coffin, with its solitary marshal’s hat, onto their shoulders, and as the cortege moved out, Richter was finally able to leave the hall. “Our new leaders!” the street loudspeakers boomed as he went home to take a shower. The pianist was key to the Soviet belief that its system bred excellence, a state-sponsored demonstration of the superior life under socialism and the greater glories ahead. Yet Richter was an unreliable idol. In the thick of Stalin’s purges, he had refused to attend the Moscow Conservatory’s obligatory weekly classes in Marxism-Leninism and the history of the Communist Party, and had twice been expelled, though both times he was readmitted at the insistence of his teacher, Heinrich Neuhaus. He could never remember his own telephone number or apartment number, and he intermittently plunged from manic periods into black depressions. During one long bout, he took a plastic lobster everywhere, letting go only the instant he went onstage.

  The procession wove past the U.S. embassy on Mokhovaya Street, turned into Red Square, and halted. Four short, flabby figures trudged up the steps to the tribune of the granite mausoleum where Stalin had reviewed his troops and received his people’s adulation. To seasoned Kremlinologists, the order of the eulogists was a sure sign of where power now lay. Malenkov, somber and swaddled in fur, had replaced Stalin as the most powerful man in the Soviet Union. As well as being named chairman of the Council of Ministers, or premier, he topped the list of members of the Presidium of the Central Committee, the real policy-making body, and of the Secretariat of the Central Committee, the bureaucracy that administered party business. Beria, in his bulky overcoat and trilby, was minister for internal affairs, back in direct charge of the security services. Molotov, the arch Stalinist with his gray coat, gray hair, and gray mustache, visibly distraught over Stalin’s death (though his wife was still in Stalin’s prison), had been reinstated as foreign minister. Khrushchev, at fifty-eight, looking like an overgrown Boy Scout with jug ears poking out beneath a flowerpot-shaped hat, was restricted to introducing the others. Like them, he retained his membership in the Presidium, and like Malenkov, he was also a member of the Secretariat. Yet he had been replaced as head of the Moscow party without being given new responsibilities, and few paid him much heed.

  After the speeches, the embalmed body was installed in Lenin’s mausoleum, alongside the founder of the Soviet state, who had let it be known (too late, too privately) that his protégé was unfit for power.

  AS THE final masterpiece in the long Stalinist performance came to an end, another notable funeral was taking place in Moscow. Sergei Prokofiev had died on March 5, less than an hour before his former patron and tormentor.

  Prokofiev’s body was laid out in an open casket in the dank cellars of the Union of Soviet Composers, the scene of his earlier denunciation. There were no flowers left in the city, but his neighbors provided a few potted plants. On March 7 the mourners who carried his coffin to Novodevichy Cemetery—among them his old rival and fellow sufferer Dmitri Shostakovich—struggled against the tide of humanity surging to pay its last respects to Stalin. Politics had stifled art, but art made a subtle protest. Richter had heard of the great composer’s death on his way to Moscow, and it was later whispered that he and the other musicians in the Columned Hall had actually been playing for Prokofiev.

  If so, perhaps they were celebrating the music more than the man. Prokofiev’s spurned wife, Lina, first suspected he had died when she heard his music on a radio at her labor camp in the far north; it had not been broadcast for years. Since her arrest, she had had no contact with the husband she had accompanied to Russia, but eventually a letter arrived from her son describing his last moments. “And what a cruel—tragic—coincidence,” the young man wrote—but the censor’s black pen had struck out the rest.

  THE SOVIET Union was one of the world’s two nuclear superpowers. It was the earth’s largest state by area and the imperial overlord of Eastern Europe. It was the bellwether of international communism and the patron of Mao’s China. It had the world’s second-largest industrial capacity and a literate, educated workforce. Its organs of state functioned as one body, and its people were passive, acquiescent, and proud of their nation’s breakneck industrialization, free health care and schooling, and great victory in the war. With their fortitude and the Kremlin’s goading, the reconstruction of devastated cities and industries was almost complete. For all its many faults (a climate of fear, the dead hand of bureaucracy, widespread poverty, limited incentives to work, the denial of individual rights in the name of equality, the inversion of rational thought by state diktat, the ease with which a dictator could delegitimize the machinery of state), the Soviet Union was at the height of its power.

  Yet the men who inherited that power were on unfamiliar ground. For as long as they could remember, their purpose in life had been to compete for Stalin’s approval. It was never going to be easy to work together.

  Malenkov’s reign lasted barely a week. Khrushchev and Beria ganged up to remove him from the Secretariat, and a revised list was issued, with Khrushchev’s name at the top. The sinister Beria was now the kingpin, and with astonishing facility he began to undo his life’s work. Within days, he banned the torture he had so enthusiastically meted out, restored freedom of movement to millions he had driven into exile, proposed some autonomy for the non-Russian nations he had worked to destroy, freed more than a million from the Gulag camps he controlled, moved to pressure the Chinese and North Koreans into ending the Korean War, and even proposed allowing Germany to reunify as a capitalist country in return for compensation and guarantees of neutrality. During the May Day parades, he stood next to Molotov on the viewing balcony of the Lenin-Stalin mausoleum and whispered in his ear, “I did him in! I saved you all!” Iron Butt, his beloved wife now restored to him by Beria, took it that Beria was claiming credit for Stalin’s death.

  Brutal, clever, and utterly unprincipled, Beria stood revealed as a careerist w
ho had never believed in communism and who dreamed of being a world statesman. But he was moving too far, too fast for the rest of the leadership, who anyway despised him for humiliating them at Stalin’s dinners with schoolboy pranks (slipping a ripe tomato onto Molotov’s chair or into Mikoyan’s trouser pocket, or writing “PRICK” on a sheet of paper and pinning it to Khrushchev’s back) and even more for his well-known predilection for cruising the streets in his burly black ZiL in search of underage girls. Of more material concern were the several divisions of troops that he had brought in to police Stalin’s funeral and kept in Moscow, fueling rumors that he was secretly preparing for a coup.

  Khrushchev sensed an opportunity. Like most of the leadership, he was a fanatical believer in Marxism-Leninism. The barely educated son of poor peasants, before discovering politics he had eked out a living as a miner, herd boy, railwayman, brick factory laborer, and metal fitter. “We wiped our noses on our sleeves and kept our trousers up with a piece of string” was his typically picturesque summary of his childhood. In the first years after the revolution, he later recalled, he and his comrades had no idea how to use a toilet and squatted on the seat, putting numerous bathrooms beyond use. Stalin had once chortled that Khrushchev was incapable of grasping statistics but had to be humored because he was the only real proletarian among the leadership. Now, with one eye on his political advantage and another on the mortal danger he was convinced Beria posed to the party, Khrushchev made his move.

  “Beria is getting his knives ready for us,” he said to Malenkov.

  “Well, what can we do?” pondered the accommodating premier, who was himself against nuclear weapons and for talks with the West. “I see, but what steps can we take?”

  Khrushchev suggested a scheme, and to his surprise Malenkov agreed to go along with it. Operating in secrecy, they won over a majority of the leadership, crucially including Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the hero of the Second World War, who was now deputy defense minister. An ambitious peasant like Khrushchev, Zhukov had been sidelined by Stalin and hated Beria for his murderous inroads on the army command.