KHRUSHCHEV “WAS EXTRAORDINARILY PROUD” OF THE FACT THAT IN 1957, “for the first time in Russian history,” a political coup was not followed by repression of the defeated. It was indeed a fortunate precedent from his point of view. Seven years later, he too would be toppled— bloodlessly, and this time fully legally—to be succeeded by a new self-consciously collective leadership headed by Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin. Khrushchev was not quite the last of the team to leave the political stage. That honor went to Anastas Mikoyan, the great survivor of Soviet politics. Persuaded by Khrushchev to take on the challenge of trying to turn the Supreme Soviet into something more democratic, like a European parliament, he chaired that body until the end of 1965, more than a year after Khrushchev’s ouster in October 1964, retiring with the appropriate honors at the age of seventy. When he left the Presidium a few months later, it was after almost forty years of continuous tenure.
The fate of the Anti-Party Group after their political defeat and expulsion from the Presidium was at first rather mild. All three lost their Presidium and Central Committee membership, and the city of Molotov in the Urals reverted to its old name of Perm. But they kept their party membership and all were given jobs, although Molotov and Kaganovich, aged sixty-seven and sixty-two, respectively, might well have been simply retired. Admittedly, the jobs were not stellar, and all were out of Moscow. Molotov got the ambassadorship to Mongolia, and buckled down to the job with his usual conscientiousness; he was liked by the embassy staff and feted by the Mongolians, who were proud to have such a famous man among them. He did too well, in short, so after some months in Ulan Bator, various humiliations were arranged to remind the locals that he was a man in semidisgrace. He was then (1960) shipped off to Vienna as Soviet cochairman on the Atomic Energy Commission, where he again worked hard and earned the respect of his staff.
Kaganovich was sent off to the Urals to head a chemical factory in the industrial town of Azbest, where he did badly, bullying subordinates. Whenever there was an accident at the plant, Kaganovich, in true Stalinist style, started a hunt for wreckers. Malenkov, in his early fifties, got a similar posting in Kazakhstan, heading a hydroelectric plant (he had originally trained as an electrical engineer). Like Molotov, he worked hard and did well, establishing himself as a “liberal” director, making friends, and settling so fully into local life that he was elected as a delegate to the regional party conference. This very much annoyed Khrushchev and earned Malenkov an official rebuke for “seeking cheap popularity.” He was then moved from Ust-Kamenogorsk to Ekibastuz, as a director of another smaller power plant, where for ten years he and his wife had a lonely time, under blatant KGB supervision and afraid that if they made friends, they would get them into trouble.
Bulganin, though not officially disgraced, was nevertheless on his way out, being replaced as chair of the Council of Ministers by Khrushchev (who thus became top man in the government as well as the party) in March 1958 and dropped from the Presidium six months later. He retired in 1960, just before his sixty-fifth birthday. Voroshilov, at almost eighty, retired from the Presidium and the chairmanship of the Supreme Soviet in the same year. For Bulganin, who was linked unfavorably in the public mind with Khrushchev’s junketing and foreign travel, there were few regrets. Voroshilov, as a legendary military man and the leader people liked to imagine as their uncle or grandfather, kept a place in the popular imagination.1
While Khrushchev had originally intended to treat his former colleagues with respect, it didn’t work out that way. In a second wave of de-Stalinization in 1961, when the decision was taken to remove Stalin’s body from the Lenin Mausoleum, the Anti-Party Group came under renewed attack, Voroshilov along with them. “Certain stars, which are very far removed from earth, seem to shine on although they have been extinct for a long time,” Khrushchev said snidely, accusing them of trying to put a lid on exposure of Stalin’s crimes in order to conceal their own guilt. The outcome was that all three members of the Anti-Party Group (but not Voroshilov) were expelled from the party, about which they were understandably bitter. As Kaganovich complained, since 1957 they had “honestly and zealously toiled in the positions offered to them, as communists should,” and no new criticisms had been offered. It was a shabby end to a lifetime in the party—but then again, they weren’t the first whose careers ended like that.
With the end of his Vienna posting, Molotov and Polina were allowed to return to the old Granovsky Street apartment in Moscow, and were also given use of a dacha. People didn’t usually recognize Molotov on the street, but he was occasionally sighted in the First Hall of the Lenin Library (reserved for members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, professors, and foreign scholars), working away on his memoirs, according to rumor, though it turned out to be a treatise on socialist economics. For the other two, banishment from Moscow lasted longer—until 1965 in Kaganovich s case and 1968 in Malenkov’s. According to urban legend, Kaganovich was sometimes recognized and abused on the street after his return (nobody ever forgot that he was the Jew on the Stalin team), and occasionally got into fights with people who called him a murderer. He lived in straitened circumstances, as did the Malenkovs, who for some time had to share their daughter’s apartment, until Valeria’s successor as director of the Power Institute took pity and got them a two-bedroom one of their own. Nobody recognized Malenkov on the street, perhaps because he had lost so much weight.
By the time all three members of the Anti-Party Group were back in Moscow, Khrushchev had joined them in unwilling retirement. After 1957, by all accounts, Khrushchev became even more bumptious, impetuous, and prone to unilateral action. Hampered by a lagging economy and tarnished by a series of policy setbacks, the most notorious being the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was ousted in October 1964 by a unanimous vote of the Central Committee after his fellow Presidium members took advantage of his absence on holiday in the Crimea to plot his removal. Their complaints against him were essentially the same as those raised in 1957—rudeness, impatience with colleagues, nonconsultation—but this time it was not the Old Guard against him, with all their Stalinist baggage, but a new one, headed by his former protégé, an active supporter in the fight with the Anti-Party Group in 1957: Leonid Brezhnev. The only person on the Presidium who spoke up for him was Mikoyan, who—as he had done for Beria in 1953—argued that for all his faults, he could still be useful in a reduced position, but his suggestion was angrily rejected by the others. Khrushchev didn’t put up a fight, agreeing to resign his positions and go into retirement. The notices in the press linked his retirement with “his advanced age and state of health,” but nevertheless printed his colleagues’ criticisms about violating “the Leninist principle of collective leadership,” so that it was clear he had been pushed out. He was allowed to stay in Moscow and keep his apartment and dacha, and given a reasonable pension.2
Sharing a common fate of nonhonorable retirement did not bring the old team members back together. On the contrary, the antagonisms and bitterness between them after 1964 exceeded even the worst periods of the past. There were too many resentments, too many betrayals. Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich could never forgive Khrushchev for what he had said about them in 1957, and saw his own disgrace in 1964 as well deserved. For Molotov, Khrushchev was now a Rightist; for Kaganovich, a Trotskyist. Even Mikoyan, naturally inclined to maintain relations with all and sundry, and an ally of Khrushchev’s up to the end, kept his distance after being rebuked by Brezhnev and the KGB for telephoning the disgraced Khrushchev with New Year’s greetings. As for the Anti-Party Group, who had never been close friends or even a real political faction, they kept aloof from each other. Malenkov appears to have had no contact with either of the others after 1957. Kaganovich occasionally telephoned Molotov in the 1970s, even claiming to Chuev that they were friends. But Molotov did not reciprocate and kept him at arm’s length.
The arguments about responsibility for the crimes of the Stalin period continued through retirement up to the team members’ deaths and even beyond, through the medium of surviving family members, supporters, and advocates. The politicians themselves, with the exception of Malenkov, either took up the pen or gave extensive interviews in self-justification. In Khrushchev’s case, it was the tape recorder, on which after his disgrace in 1964 he dictated memoirs that were smuggled out to the West by younger family members and published in many languages in the 1970s. Kaganovich tried his hand at a memoir in the 1990s (Notes of a Worker, Communist-Bolshevik, Trade-Union, Party and Soviet-State Functionary was its wonderfully leaden title). Mikoyan’s memoirs were published posthumously around the same time, edited by his son Sergo. The Stalinist/Russian nationalist writer Felix Chuev published two thick volumes of interviews with Molotov and Kaganovich conducted in the 1970s and 1980s.
As they looked back at the past, what could they still be proud of? There was general agreement that in fighting the factions in the 1920s, the team had been on the right path, paving the way for the industrialization drive, which made the Soviet Union modern, and victory in the Second World War, which made the Soviet Union a great nation. When it came to collectivization, there was less certainty, not just because of the famine but also because of the poor performance thereafter of Soviet agriculture, which the team had agreed needed reform in first order after Stalin died. Still, the consensus was that the basic principle of collectivization was good, an important step forward toward socialism, although there had been “excesses,” for which both overenthusiastic local officials and Stalin were to blame. Molotov and Kaganovich, who had been deeply involved with Stalin in the direction of such “excesses,” were much less inclined to emphasize them than Khrushchev and Mikoyan.
Soviet achievements had been gained through struggle, and in struggle, the team assumed, there are bound to be casualties. The question raised by the 1956 de-Stalinization, which remained contested for decades, was which casualties were unjustified to the point that rehabilitation was called for? In his Secret Speech, Khrushchev had put Politburo and Central Committee members and top military leaders—purged in 1937–38—and victims of the postwar Leningrad Affair in this category, and the rehabilitation commissions of the second half of the 1950s broadened this to include most Communist officials and other elite members who were arrested as “enemies of the people” during the Great Purges.
But what about the various Oppositions? The demonized Trotsky was quite out of the question, nor was there strong pressure for rehabilitation of others from the old Left Opposition, but the Right was a different matter. Mikoyan and even Molotov remembered Bukharin with some personal affection, as probably did Voroshilov, though mixed with guilt. Khrushchev, on the other hand, hadn’t really known Bukharin and had launched his political career in the center of the fight against the Right. The question of rehabilitating Bukharin and Rykov was raised at a Presidium meeting in 1957, and Mikoyan supported it. Khrushchev, while agreeing that the show trials were “rubbish, all made up,” thought he had had enough on his plate dealing with Stalin, and Bukharin would have to wait. Later, after his fall, he regretted this. After he was gone, the new Brezhnev-Kosygin leadership came under renewed pressure, including from economic reformers who were advocating return to a partial market system on the lines of the Soviet NEP in the 1920s, but they too held the line. It was not until November 1987, under Gorbachev, that Bukharin was officially rehabilitated, along with other victims of the Moscow show trials, including Zinoviev and Kamenev (but not Yagoda or Trotsky) following the next year.3
Retrospective appraisal of Stalin and the Great Purges was the great issue for all the team members and a bone of contention between them. The team was pulled several ways on this, and all undoubtedly were internally conflicted. On the one hand, their lifetime achievements were also Stalin’s; if all Stalin’s achievements were discounted, they had nothing to claim except (in Khrushchev’s and Mikoyan’s case) recognition of their role in condemning him in 1956. On the other hand, since the question of responsibility for the Great Purges was inescapable, it was in every team member’s interest to pile as much as possible on Stalin, either alone or as incited by Beria. The aim of all but the staunch Molotov was to suggest that other team members were more culpable than themselves. Yet, on the still more painful question of responsibility for failure to prevent the death of friends, even Molotov may sometimes have wavered. When Olga Aroseva, daughter of the friend he didn’t save, visited the Molotovs in the mid-1950s, he was still staunchly resisting any notion of guilt. But when she saw him again a few years later, after his fall from power, she found him quite different, penitent and regretful: “the daughter of Sasha Arosev may not want to shake my hand … I am guilty before Sasha.”
Molotov never ceased to insist in later life that, while Stalin had done some things wrong, he was basically a great and irreplaceable leader, responsible for industrialization, keeping the party together, winning the Second World War, and making the Soviet Union a great power. “Not one man after Lenin, not only I but not Kalinin, Dzerzhinsky or others, did even a tenth of what Stalin did.… As a political figure he played a role that nobody could take on their shoulders.” He had not done it alone—he needed the team, and Molotov in particular had been an important support. The Soviet Union had real enemies, at home and abroad, and its leaders had to be tough. Even the Great Purges were basically justified in Molotov’s account, and he admitted personal responsibility, while pointing out that it was shared by all the other members of the team. By all accounts, both Molotov and his wife remained staunch Stalinists. Polina— who, unlike her husband, had not lost her party membership in 1961—was “full of energy and militant spirit” and regularly attended meetings of her primary party organization in a candy factory. When Svetlana Alliluyeva visited the Molotovs in the 1960s, Polina told her, “Your father was a genius. He destroyed the fifth column in our country, and when the war began, the party and people were united.” Molotov was quieter, but nodded assent to Polina’s statements. The Molotovs’ daughter and her husband were embarrassed, “looking down at their plates,” and to Svetlana Alliluyeva, now mixing with quasi-dissident intellectuals like the writer Andrei Sinyavsky, they seemed like “dinosaurs.”
Kaganovich took a similar stand, though a bit more defensively. Accusations about his failure to save his brother Mikhail always upset him, and he emphasized more than Molotov how Stalin manipulated his associates to make them accomplices in the death of their colleagues. Voroshilov was uneasy about Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization initiative and wrote of Stalin in 1968 that for all his mistakes, “I cannot speak of him without respect.” When speaking privately to Vasily Stalin in 1960, he qualified his endorsement of “the good that your father did” with the comment that “in the last years your father got very strange, he was surrounded by scoundrels like Beria … It is all the bad influence of Beria.”
Even the team’s strongest de-Stalinizers, Khrushchev and Mikoyan, were not without ambivalence about Stalin. He wasn’t overall an “enemy of the party and the working class,” Khrushchev told Polish Communists in 1956, “and that’s where the tragedy is, comrades.” He wanted to “serve society,” and it was in that context that his crimes were committed. Clearly, he developed a “persecution mania.” “But, comrades, Stalin—I wish I could describe the warm side, his concern for people.”4
Reputation was a delicate bloom in the Soviet Union. The team, even when riding high in the Stalin period, were subject to sudden changes of fortune, and in the post-Stalin period, all the more. Beria came crashing down first, then Molotov, Kaganovich, and Malenkov, then their destroyer, Khrushchev. It was more or less de rigueur for at least one family member of anyone prominent in politics or the arts to devote a large part of their life to keeping the flame, lobbying whomever they had access to in the political leadership, sponsoring favorable journalist publications and academic research, rebutting criticism, holding memorial evenings, and doing everything they could to burnish their man’s reputation. Just as supporters and family members of Great Purge victims did their best to get them rehabilitated in the 1950s, so in the decades that followed did sons, daughters, widows, and sometimes personal assistants of the Stalin team.
First into the field of celebration was Sergo Ordzhonikidze’s widow, Zinaida, with her biography The Path of a Bolshevik (1938). Ordzhonikidze’s reputation, though not overtly attacked in the years after his death, was at least tarnished and in need of a polishing (the Caucasus city named after him, formerly Vladikavkaz, had its name changed in 1944; when Zinaida protested, Stalin reassured her that he would get another, better city named after him, but it never happened). Zinaida’s initiative made Ekaterina Voroshilova uneasy (should one be acting as publicist for one’s husband?), but nevertheless the fashion took hold. In the 1960s Galina Kuibysheva published her book on her brother Valerian. In the 1980s, Natalia Andreeva rather tentatively took up the cudgels on behalf of her father, Andrei Andreev. The sons of Beria, Malenkov, and Khrushchev all entered the lists in the 1990s, the first two with memoirs of their fathers, the third with hybrid volumes of memoir-history written for a Western audience. In 2005, Molotov’s son-in-law published the first volume of a biography.
The big loser in the family memoir stakes was Stalin. His surviving son Vasily was ready enough to defend him (“I have never repudiated my father and never will”), but he was in such bad shape after Stalin’s death that the best he could do was make dark references to his father’s enemies, who had probably murdered him, in long, incoherent sessions with drinking companions. After his arrest in April 1953 for loose talk to foreigners and trading on his position as son of a famous man, he was in and out of prison and hospitals, with relatives and party leaders (the “uncles” of his childhood) trying unavailingly to help. Khrushchev called him in and received him “like a real father,” begging him to change his ways; Voroshilov did the same; they all embraced and wept, and Vasily promised amendment, but it never lasted. He died of drink in 1962, at the age of forty.5
In Voroshilov’s conversations with Vasily, Svetlana was held up as an example to him, as had been the case for most of his life. But Svetlana, for so long the good child in the Stalin family, was also going off the rails. The “uncles” had seen and sympathized with her suffering in her first affair (with Kapler) and two short failed marriages (to Grigory Morozov and Yury Zhdanov). They hovered uneasily during de-Stalinization in 1956, Mikoyan inviting her over to read Khrushchev’s speech in advance and being immensely relieved at her calm reaction (“the worst thing is, guys, that it’s true,” she told the Mikoyan sons). Her attitude angered Vasily, who told Voroshilov he felt she was repudiating their father. After she became a researcher at the Institute of Literature in 1956, she did her best to forget the milieu she came from, legally changing her last name to Alliluyeva and seeking rebirth both in the intelligentsia and the Orthodox Church. She sought out former “Kremlin children” who had returned from Gulag and exile, and in quick succession had an affair with Yury Tomsky (Mikhail’s son) and then married her cousin Vano (formerly Johnny) Svanidze, both bitter, nervy, and at best ambivalent about Stalin’s daughter.
Struggling to keep her head above water after Svanidze divorced her in 1959, she met an Indian Communist, Brajesh Singh, who was substantially older and in bad health, and they decided to marry. This was, of course, endlessly complicated: he was a foreigner and had to leave the country upon expiration of his visa; when he finally got back and they tried to register their marriage (a special procedure when a foreigner was involved), permission was refused. Mikoyan, to whom Svetlana turned for support in the summer of 1964, had been encouraging and checked it out with Khrushchev, who made no objections—but by the time they actually got to the registry office, Khrushchev was out of power, and the new leadership, fearful of the publicity fallout outside the Soviet Union, for some time refused permission for her to marry “this old sick Hindu.” Mikoyan tried in vain to convince her that marriage was a formality—look at him and Ashkhen, who were never formally married, but it hadn’t hurt them or their five children. Then, in October 1966, Singh died. Svetlana was given permission to take the body back to India on condition that she avoided contact with the press. Once in India, however, she ended up—not, she later insisted, according to a prior plan—going to the American Embassy in Delhi and asking for asylum. It was an international and domestic sensation: Stalin’s daughter defects! The official Soviet reaction was outrage, though Khrushchev and Mikoyan (now both in retirement) were not without sympathy for Svetlana. “It was an unforgivable thing for a Soviet citizen to do,” Khrushchev said in his memoirs (probably dictated shortly after her defection, in 1967–68). “Nevertheless, I still feel very sorry for her … The very thought of Svetlanka brings tears to my eyes.” He hoped that one day she would change her mind and come back.
She had left two children behind in Moscow: twenty-year-old Osya (Joseph) and sixteen-year-old Katya, who reportedly never forgave her mother for leaving. (The Mikoyan family swung into action yet again to help them, as did Katya’s father Yury Zhdanov.) But what Svetlana took with her was an autobiographical manuscript, published in the West to fresh sensation in 1967 as Twenty Letters to a Friend. A touching document, it contained Svetlana’s effort to imagine her mother (who died when she was only six) in idealized terms, and her attempt to come to terms with Stalin, both as a father—loving and beloved when she was a child, later increasingly estranged and, on both sides, critical—and a national leader. It was clearly Svetlana’s own work, though the Soviet press thundered about the hand of the CIA, and it was not a hatchet job. But it didn’t show the kind of unquestioning loyalty that other Kremlin children displayed when writing about their parents, or that her brother Vasya would have considered appropriate. Moreover, Svetlana’s public comments after her arrival in the United States were on the standard “I chose freedom” model, hence, extremely offensive in Soviet terms. “She betrayed her father,” Sergo Beria said flatly. “Morally, humanly. As a daughter.” Poor Svetlana, after a bumpy fifteen years in the United States, was to redefect in the mid-1980s, briefly denouncing the United States and the CIA in terms not dissimilar from her earlier denunciations of the Soviet Union and the KGB, but her children were unwelcoming, and some of her old friends were too. Yury Zhdanov would meet her from time to time in Moscow, at the apartment of some old friend, but Sergo Beria and his mother cut her. She left again after a few years, this time without fanfare, and died in obscurity in the United States in 2011.6
The team had started to die long before. As always in the Soviet Union, great emphasis was put on the type of funeral and who went to it. When Ekaterina Voroshilova died in 1959, both Khrushchev and Mikoyan attended, as well as Andreev, an old family friend. Ten years later, Voroshilov was buried with full honors in the Kremlin Wall. Molotov and Kaganovich attended the funeral, along with the entire current Politburo, but not the now-disgraced Khrushchev. When Polina Zhemchuzhina died in 1970, she was buried as a Communist by the factory party cell in which she was registered. Mikoyan and Bulganin were in attendance, as well as the only grandson of Stalin’s to bear his name, Colonel Evgeny Yakovlevich Dzhugashvili, and Molotov made the last public speech of his life, praising both her life’s work as a Communist and the era in which she had lived. He did not mention the interlude of arrest and exile.
Khrushchev died the next year, in September 1971, but there was no state funeral or Kremlin Wall burial for him. It was a private funeral attended only by family, some old Communist colleagues from the Donbass, and a few members of the liberal intelligentsia who, for all the fights during his leadership, had come to have a soft spot for the man who presided over de-Stalinization. Khrushchev had also had second thoughts about the intelligentsia in the years of his retirement, when artists and professors were the only ones to risk official opprobrium by calling on him. Among them were the Thaw poet Evgeny Evtushenko and the avant-garde artist Ernst Neizvestny, whom Khrushchev had blasted in his time for departing from realism. It was Neizvestny who sculpted the head of Khrushchev that now adorns his grave in Novodevichy Cemetery. None of the team came to Khrushchev’s funeral, but there was a moment of high drama at the last moment, as the mourners were already leaving the graveside, when a messenger came dashing in with a wreath from Mikoyan.
When Mikoyan himself died in 1978, age eighty-two, the Soviet Politburo (the old title was restored in the mid-1960s) came to pay their last respects, and the government of the Soviet Union’s Armenian Republic provided an official guard of honor. He was buried, like Khrushchev and Stalin’s wife Nadya, in Novodevichy Cemetery. For all the respect, however, the current rulers were anxious to discourage any kind of political demonstration, and publicity and attendance was limited. It appears that none of the team’s survivors, the three Anti-Party Group members, showed up. Some of Khrushchev’s children were present—Khrushchev’s son Sergei had, in the years of estrangement, been a conduit to the Mikoyans through his friendship with Sergo—though his widow stayed home because of a heart condition (later regretting that she had done so).7
The triumphant survivors, in terms of longevity, were the Anti-Party Group, Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich. Having lived lives that should have driven them into early graves, the three of them managed to live not only through the long Brezhnev period but into the reforming era of Gorbachev. Malenkov, the youngest, died in 1988 at the age of eighty-six, twenty years after his return to Moscow. He thought of himself as a reformer in later life, and in conversations with his son tended to avoid discussion of Stalin. He did not write memoirs or put much emotional effort into getting readmitted to the party. An omnivorous reader, especially of science and the theory of history, Malenkov developed a passionate interest in his son’s field of biology, and with the support of Yury Andropov (Brezhnev’s longtime KGB head and briefly his successor in the 1980s), the two of them set up a research project on the defensive powers of the human organism. The coauthored scientific monograph that resulted argued that resistance to the force of gravity, demonstrated constantly by all living organisms, including humans, is as basic to life on Earth as the force of gravity itself. Recognition of this, in the authors’ view, provided a new underpinning to the idea of progress in human affairs. Thus, Malenkov died an optimist, to whom the world of politics was remote. His death went unremarked in the Soviet press.
The other two survivors stayed closer to the preoccupations of their working lives. For Molotov and Kaganovich, recovering the status of party member was enormously important. They both applied repeatedly for readmission to the party, starting with the change of regime in the autumn of 1964. During the long Brezhnev reign, they had no success, but in 1984, in the brief successor regime of Konstantin Chernenko, Molotov was finally readmitted. The party card he was issued dated his membership back to 1906, making him the oldest living party member. In describing the event to his faithful Boswell, Molotov, true to form, played down the emotional side. But Chernenko, who personally handed over the card, described the ninety-four-year-old Molotov as saying it was “like being born again.” Despite this rapprochement, Molotov was not given a state funeral when he died in 1986 at the age of ninety-six, but the government newspaper Izvestia (though not Pravda) noted his passing on the front page. (He was identified as a “personal pensioner of all-Union significance, ” a peculiarly Soviet status statement, the “personal” connoting some kind of special achievement or contribution, the “all-Union” meaning that his contribution was on a national rather than local level.) Around two hundred mourners attended, and he was buried with Polina in Novodevichy, not far from Stalin’s wife Nadya.8
The last to go was Kaganovich. Long widowed, lonely, and underoccu-pied, he grew bitter in old age. His daughter, Maya, was devoted but wrote no exculpatory memoir; Felix Chuev’s interviews with him took place so late in life that much had been forgotten, and Kaganovich was inclined to burst out with “It’s a lie” on the slightest provocation. He had hoped desperately for readmission to the party, and it was galling to be rejected again when Molotov finally succeeded. There would be strong objections from sections of the public to Kaganovich s readmission, the KGB advised, mentioning specifically Great Purges victims rehabilitated in the 1950s, and not mentioning the anti-Semites whose objections would have been equally vehement.
All things being equal, the Chernenko Politburo would have been amenable to readmitting Kaganovich and Malenkov, as well as Molotov, to the party. Brezhnev, who had been an active supporter of Khrushchev’s move against them in 1957, was gone. There was recognition that they would never have been expelled in the first place if Khrushchev had not wanted to settle scores with political rivals, and in the 1970s and 1980s, Khrushchev’s name was mud, as the man whose impulsive actions had “soiled and stained us and our policies in the eyes of the world.” Much of the Chernenko Politburo, like Andrei Gromyko (Molotov’s successor as foreign minister and an important supporter of his rehabilitation bid) and defense minister Dmitry Ustinov, belonged to the generation that had first risen to high positions in the late 1930s, in the wake of the Great Purges, when Molotov, and to a lesser extent the rest of the team, were names to conjure with.
Stalin, of course, was even more a part of their past, and the question of Stalin’s standing was much on their minds in 1984 because of the upcoming celebration of the fortieth anniversary of Soviet victory in the Second World War. It had been proposed, as part of the celebrations, to restore the Stalinist name to the city of Volgograd, site of the battle of Stalingrad. There were powerful arguments pro and con, as the youngest Politburo member, Mikhail Gorbachev—future leader, reformer, and involuntary destroyer of the Soviet Union—noted. In the end, they decided against, for the time being. But it was not unreasonable to expect that in due course Stalin, and with him the team (shorn of Beria and Khrushchev), would be back in the history books as builders of the Soviet Union, whose mistakes were outweighed by their contribution.
It turned out otherwise. Kaganovich lived on to his ninety-sixth year. When he died, still outside the party, during Gorbachev’s perestroika, his death was noted in the papers, and hundreds of people turned out, mainly photographers, local and foreign journalists, and sensation-seekers, for the cremation at Donskoi Monastery, which preceded burial at Novodevichy. The date of Kaganovich’s death was 25 July 1991. He had been the last survivor of Stalin’s team. Just five months remained until the collapse of the Soviet Union would turn their life’s work into dust.9