Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (8 page)

“Let’s put him on the sofa,” Lozgachev said. They heaved the stout body onto the pink upholstered divan, and Starostin went off to phone Ignatiev, the
head of the secret police. Ignatiev panicked and told him to phone Lavrenty Beria, the powerful security supremo.

The other guards moved Stalin from the pink divan to the sofa in
the large dining room, where the air was fresher. He shivered, and they rolled down his sleeves and covered him with a blanket.

Beria was unavailable, but Starostin reached Georgy Malenkov, Stalin’s latest favorite and heir apparent. Malenkov tried to phone Beria as well but called back after half an hour to say he couldn’t find him. Another half hour went by, and Beria himself called. “Don’t say anything to anyone about Comrade Stalin’s illness,” he instructed them.

Meanwhile, Malenkov got hold of Nikolai Bulganin, the suave deputy premier, and Nikita Khrushchev, the voluble, roly-poly party head in Moscow. These three and Beria had been Stalin’s dinner companions the previous night. For years the dictator had presided over his empire from his table, plying his increasingly bloated cronies with strong liquor and relishing their loss of control almost as much as he enjoyed hearing them inform on one another to gain favor. After the meal, the mustachioed host would play the gramophone and watch the others cut a rug; one night he made Khrushchev squat down and perform a spinning, kicking Cossack dance called the
gopak
, which even the performer likened to a cow hoofing on ice.
“When Stalin says dance, a wise man dances,” Khrushchev ruefully remarked, summing up the operation of the entire Soviet government. When the torment ended, at around 5:00 a.m., they would totter out, relieved to have survived:
“One never knows if one’s going home or to prison,” Bulganin once confided to Khrushchev. One by one, their comrades had disappeared, until the four were the last men standing.

“Look, the security boys have phoned from Stalin’s place,” Malenkov told Khrushchev. “They are very worried, something’s happened to Stalin. We’ve got to go there.” Khrushchev should go ahead, he added, and he and the others would follow. Khrushchev was surprised: when he had left, Stalin had been pretty drunk, but in fine fettle, jabbing his rotund protégé in the belly and
warbling “Mikita,” in a takeoff of Khrushchev’s Ukrainian accent.

At 3:00 a.m. a car approached through the birches, golden pines, and camouflaged antiaircraft guns and drove up to the gates in the double perimeter fence. Malenkov and Beria got out. They made an
odd pair: Malenkov, the finicky former keeper of the party records, resembling a portly baker, with his bloated torso and slicked hair; Beria, the brilliant KGB butcher and notorious pervert, equally rotund but the very picture of a shifty cartoon detective, with his turned-up collar and black trilby jammed on his head, over a pince-nez with thick lenses that made his eyes pop out.

“What’s up with the Boss?” Malenkov asked one of the guards. His boots squeaked, and as he went inside he took them off and tucked them under his arm.

Lozgachev was still with Stalin, who was snoring.

“What are you panicking for?” Beria asked, swearing at him. “The Boss is sound asleep. Let’s go, Malenkov!” The guard explained what had happened, but Beria told him not to bother them or disturb Comrade Stalin. The two men left.

Alone with Stalin, Lozgachev began to imagine the dire consequences if the
vozhd
died on his watch. He woke up the chief guard and persuaded him to call the inner circle again.

Sometime after 7:00 a.m., Khrushchev finally showed up.

“How’s the Boss?” he asked.

“He’s very poorly,” Lozgachev replied. “There’s something wrong.”

“The doctors are on their way,” Khrushchev reassured him.

The room filled up as the party bosses arrived, several openly weeping. Stalin’s eyes briefly opened, gleaming with their usual tiger intensity, and seemed to flicker with recognition. “Comrade Stalin,” his old comrade Kliment Voroshilov spoke up, “we, all your true friends and colleagues, are here. How are you feeling, dear friend?” But the moment of lucidity had gone.

By half past nine the doctors finally arrived. None of them had treated Stalin before, and their hands shook as they examined him. A dentist dropped the dictator’s false teeth. The others fumbled at his shirt, and Lozgachev tore it off. To the guard’s intense relief, the doctors diagnosed a cerebral hemorrhage: a massive stroke.

Ignatiev, the executor of the doctors’ plot, who had been head of
the secret police for less than two years, hovered outside, too scared to enter.
“Come in, don’t be shy,” Lozgachev said, waving him in. When Stalin had let fly at him a few months earlier, Ignatiev had a heart attack.

Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, arrived direct from her French class and was met by Khrushchev and Bulganin, who hugged her, weeping. Later her brother Vasily showed up, drunk as usual. After the previous year’s May Day parade, when Vasily authorized a flyby in bad weather conditions and crashed two Tu-4 bombers, Stalin fired him as Moscow Air Force commander. Not knowing the reason for the summons, Vasily had brought his maps, in case he had to account for himself. After a minute, he lurched off to the guards’ lodge and screamed that his father had been murdered, then weaved out to his car and went home.

More doctors arrived and consulted. They applied leeches behind Stalin’s ears and a cold compress to his head, injected him with camphor, administered magnesium sulfate enemas, took a urine sample, and left instructions to feed him sweet tea or soup from a spoon. Later, a coffin-like iron lung was wheeled in, accompanied by wide-eyed young specialists. Occasionally Stalin let out a groan.

Bulganin stayed with the patient while the other three leaders drove to the Kremlin for a conference in the Boss’s office. Present in the room were the ten members of the old Politburo, which Stalin had replaced the previous year with a much larger Presidium. Beria, Malenkov, and Khrushchev were there, together with old Voroshilov and Khrushchev’s mentor “Iron Lazar” Kaganovich, a former shoemaker turned manager of heavy industry and mass terror. Also in attendance were former foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, a cold-blooded hard-liner whom Lenin had nicknamed “Iron Butt,” and former foreign trade minister Anastas Mikoyan, an emphatic Armenian with dark, glittering eyes and flashing, clenched teeth. Both were Kremlin stalwarts whom Stalin had recently fired and publicly denounced. Within hours of his stroke, the old order had restored itself to power.

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.