The Strange Death of Mikhail Ryumin:

...The direction of the purge's first blow was quite plain: It struck at the economic ministries...

...This conclusion is not contradicted by the fact that the same official announcement mentions Ryumin's activity in connection with the arrest of "prominent medical figures...

...The announcement declares that Ryumin, "acting as a concealed enemy of the Soviet state, for careerist and adventurist purposes, entered upon the falsification of investigative material, on the basis of which provocational cases were set up and Soviet citizens, including prominent medical figures, were unjustifiably arrested...

...We will then understand that Ryumin has now been executed because the arrests of Communist economic managers which he carried out resulted in "undermining of state industry, transport, trade...

...Today, anti-American material is perhaps not as clumsy or crude in Soviet propaganda as in the last period of Stalin's life, but it is politically just as sharp...

...Who were these defenders...

...As early as April 18, 1953, I wrote in the Russian-language paper Novoye Russkoye Slovo: "Somewhat cautiously, but in a clearly methodical fashion, the Soviet press edged toward the economic ministries: the trade and cooperative organs, transport machine-building, the oil industry, the Ministry of Supply, the Ministry of Non-Ferrous Metals, etc...

...The announcement of Ryumin's execution also throws further light on the Beria case...

...Just as, in the official announcement, the arrest of the "prominent medical figures" is mentioned only in passing, so in Ryumin's trial the doctors' plot was undoubtedly treated as secondary...

...This may not have been due to the Ryumin affair...

...It was obvious at that time that a vast new purge, like the "Yezhovshchina" of the 1930s, was beginning...

...Malenkov, of course, does not want to tell the general public the truth about the "second Yezhovshchina," from which the "Party and Government" were saved by Stalin's death at the convenient moment...

...The foreign-policy motivations of the purge were by no means unacceptable in principle to Malenkov...

...The first was anti-Semitic and anti-American, dictated above all by considerations of foreign policy...

...Just what were these cases...

...he did not combat them and does not wish to combat them today...

...When Malenkov played down the doctors plot in the explanation of Ryumin's execution, he showed that: he had no intention of combating either the anti-Semitic or the anti-American motif...

...The first is a statement by Erich Wollenberg, once a prominent German Communist who also held high posts in the Soviet Army before fleeing Russia twenty years ago...

...Ignatyev might have been merely a "cover" and the real director of the purge might have been Ryumin--acting under the general behind-the-scenes supervision of Poskrebyshev and...

...It has not yet been possible to check these items precisely...

...then it is quite possible that the real organizer of Stalin's purge was Ryumin and not Ignatyev, who was then Minister of State Security and Ryumin's nominal chief...

...It was for these cases that Ryumin was sentenced to death...

...The trial was so long because many of Ryumin's victims were questioned--people who had been subjected to "unjustifiable arrest" and had barely missed appearing as defendants in "provocational cases...

...Main attention in the trial was obviously concentrated on Ryumin's attempt to set up other "provocational cases"--namely, those cases which made it possible to cite him for "undermining" the normal activity of Soviet economic organs...

...Our information about Ryumin himself is very scanty...

...The ties between Khrushchev and Malenkov are old and complex...

...in particular, it moved toward Tevosyan and Malyshev, who at that time held the posts of Stalin's deputies in the Council of Ministers, controlling the work of the economic ministries...

...This editorial was a summary of the publishable portions of the long indictment which Malenkov made against Beria at the Central Committee plenum held between June 24 (the date of Beria's arrest) and July 10 (when the arrest was announced...

...The exploitation of these themes is for him purely a question of expediency...

...As so often happens, Beria and Malenkov, allies in the struggle against Stalin's purge, had a sharp falling-out as soon as they had won their battle...

...This conclusion is confirmed by two items regarding Ryumin's past which I have recently encountered...

...Beria led the struggle against the first aspect of the purge, and thus he accused Ryumin in the matter of the doctors' plot...

...If this is true, especially if Ryumin was really chief of the state-security section in Stalin's secretariat and therefore a confidant of the famous Alexander Poskrebyshev...

...Nor does the regime have any intention of abandoning anti-American agitation...

...more likely, Khrushchev's agricultural policies (and their results) were involved...

...This was no accident...

...When I made the above comments last year, I could not know, of course, how the charge against Ryumin would be formulated, but we can now compare that analysis with the text of Article 58, Point 7, under which Ryumin was sentenced...

...But a shadow seems to have fallen across their relations after 1949, and Malenkov's criticisms of Khrushchev's policy in his report to the Nineteenth Party Congress showed that, in the fight between Beria and Khrushchev, Malenkov was rather inclined toward Beria...

...But one basic fact emerges from all these accounts, namely, that Ryumin could rise from his former obscurity to the responsible post of Deputy Minister of State Security only through the back door of Stalin's personal secretariat...

...In the detailed indictment presented in court, Article 115 undoubtedly had its place, of course, and it was under this article that Ryumin was accused of actions connected with the "unjustifiable arrest" of "prominent medical figures...

...If Ryumin was condemned under Point 7, we must assume that his principal sin involved "undermining" of the country's economic life or "obstruction of the normal activity" of state industry, trade, cooperatives, etc...

...But it is quite likely that Malenkov took advantage of the agricultural issue to press the Ryumin case...

...A purge of the economic organs would necessarily have benefited this apparatus, which was what Poskrebyshev wanted...

...In other words, before Ryumin was turned over to a military collegium for trial, his case was considered and decided by the Central Committee plenum...

...The situation is much more complicated...

...Malenkov opposed the second of Stalin's objectives, i.e., the campaign against the economic managers, and it was for Ryumin's attempt to crush the latter that Malenkov has now had him shot...

...This attempt was checked by a bloc comprising two main forces--those standing behind Malenkov and those standing behind Beria...

...He was and remains a determined foe of America...

...second, the trial took place very soon after the special plenum of the Party Central Committee which met in June of this year...

...After Stalin's death, he became the protector of Ignatyev, who had been deposed as a Central Committee Secretary when Ryumin was arrested...

...By themselves, the actions of the investigative organs in "employing methods of investigation prohibited by Soviet law" (also mentioned in the announcement of Ryumin's execution) are a very secondary sort of crime from the Soviet point of view...

...Even then, not all within the regime's "collective leadership" were in agreement, as was revealed in the press after Beria's arrest...

...Nevertheless, since the Party bureaucracy in the Central Committee constitutes a tremendous majority, the decision to remand Ryumin for trial must have been approved by a substantial part of the Party bureaucracy...

...but he wants the leaders of the regime to know all about it and to realize who aided this "second Yezhovshchina" and who combated it...

...they are punishable by up to five years' "deprivation of freedom" (Article 115 of the Criminal Code...

...But who could have been Ryumin's defender...

...In other words, the difference between these two formulations--that of the April 6, 1953 Pravda stressing the doctors' plot and that of the July 23, 1954 announcement stressing economic disruption--reflects the difference in approach to the Ryumin case which divided Beria, on the one hand, from Malenkov, on the other...

...The main enemy was declared to be the United States, which allegedly stood behind the doctors ("murderers in white robes"), but the press devoted particular attention to exposing "loafers...

...as well as cooperatives...

...If anyone in the present Party leadership might have supported Stalin's purge, it would be Khrushchev...

...We are forced to this conclusion by the official announcement of Ryumin's execution...

...His is a subtle game...

...They joined forces in the post-Stalin fight against Beria, but they did not become real allies...

...If the two of them recently took a vacation together in the Caucasus, it was obviously because each of them feared to leave the other in Moscow outside his surveillance...

...A re-reading of the newspapers published in those months, and their comparison with the newspapers of 1937, when Stalin's famous speech of March 3 at a plenum of the Party Central Committee served as a signal for launching of the purge, only confirms our original impression...

...There is also no doubt that defenders of Ryumin at this plenum could only have come from the ranks of representatives of the Party apparatus, on which the organizer of the purge, Poskrebyshev, had based his position...

...The Ryumin affair was linked in the general consciousness with the famous "Jewish doctors' plot," and his shooting at this time seems inconsistent...

...In that case...

...One fact is most illuminating: The June special plenum of the Central Committee--the session which remanded Ryumin to trial--was the only one of the post-Stalin plenums in which Nikita S. Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist party, was not mentioned in the official report...

...In fact, Ryumin was not shot because he directed the investigation in the "plot...

...Of course, Beria and Malenkov had other vital disagreements on some extremely important questions of policy...

...In that case, Ryumin was by no means a "scapegoat" who paid for someone else's crimes but the real criminal of top rank, second in importance in the whole "second Yezhovshchina" only to Poskrebyshev...

...This time, Khrushchev played a very small role...

...In the April 15, 1953 issue of the small bulletin, Die aktuelle Reportage, published in Frankfurt, Wollenberg reported that Ryumin played some sort of behind-the-scenes role in organizing the great trials of the first "Yezhovshchina" (1936-38...

...By excluding this point and thus repudiating Beria, the regime is now in a position to play this card whenever it considers it expedient...

...In other words, Ryumin was accused of trying to frame not only the case of the "prominent medical figures" but a whole series of other "provocational cases...

...its tone was set by the announcement of January 13, 1953 on the discovery of the "doctors' plot...

...Only for a very short time did anti-American themes disappear from the Soviet press--during the months when Beria headed the unified MVD...

...At the top of the list, of course, stood the "doctors' plot," but that was obviously needed primarily in order to "create an atmosphere...

...The Pravda editorial of April 6, 1953 shows that Beria tried to combat the anti-Semitic and the indissolubly related anti-American aspect of the purge...

...Available evidence suggests that the execution of Ryumin, while it strengthened Malenkov's position, weakened Khrushchev's...

...The chief target of the purge was to be the leaders of economic organizations--industry, transport, trade...

...From this point of view, the announcement of Ryumin's execution confirms the analysis that Malenkov fought against Stalin's purge exclusively because its organizers in Stalin's personal secretariat were aiming at the economic managers and had already begun to strike blows against leading representatives of this group in Malenkov's most intimate surroundings...

...Among the reasons for this split was the question of just which of the elements in Stalin's policy should be eliminated...

...They all repeated the phrase about "a crime covered by Article 58, Point 7 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic," but no one examined the actual contents of Point 7. The exact wording is as follows: "Undermining of state industry, transport, trade, currency or credit, as well as cooperatives, carried out for counter-revolutionary purposes by means of the appropriate use of state institutions and enterprises or obstruction of their normal activity, as well as the use of state institutions and enterprises or obstruction of their activity carried out in the interests of the former owners or of affected capitalist organizations, incurs the measures of social defense indicated in Article 58, Point 2 of the present Code...

...No report of the trial has appeared in the press, and, of course, none will appear...

...There is no question of it: The last months of Stalin's life marked the beginning of a new, brutal purge, complete with mass arrests, deportations, executions and show trials, preparations for which were being made at a feverish pace...

...Close study of the Soviet press and examination of the "accusations" then appearing in various Soviet organs makes even clearer the direction in which the organizers of this campaign aimed their first blows...

...There is no doubt that Malenkov obtained the execution of Ryumin at the June plenum of the Central Committee and that he was supported by all those whom, a year and a half before, Ryumin had planned to run through the meat-grinder of the "second Yezhovshchina," i.e., primarily the economic managers, who constitute the second largest group in the present Central Committee...

...The official announcement on the discovery of the doctors' plot, published in Moscow on January 13, 1953, was the signal for the opening of a large-scale campaign against foreign and domestic enemies of the Soviet regime...

...Stalin's policy had two main motivations...

...But the role of this charge was so slight, and the punishment meted out to Ryumin under Article 115 was so completely lost in the general mass of punishment which descended on him, that it was not deemed necessary to mention it in the official announcement...

...In this indictment, Malenkov asserted that the old characterization of Ryumin's activities--given in the April 6 Pravda--was a "distortion" of the meaning of the "direct instructions of the Party Central Committee and the Soviet Government...

...It is wrong, I think, to regard the Ryumin affair as merely the reverse side of the "doctors' plot...

...Possibly representatives of this bureaucracy attended the trial...

...In an editorial on the Beria case, appearing in Pravda and Izvestia for July 10, 1953, there was the following passage: "Being obliged to carry out direct instructions of the Party Central Committee and the Soviet Government on strengthening Soviet legality and liquidating certain instances of illegality and arbitrariness, Beria deliberately blocked the carrying out of those instructions and, in a number of cases, tried to distort them...

...before being appointed in 1952 to the post of Deputy Minister of State Security, headed the state-security section in Stalin's personal secretariat...

...If Beria, with all his power at that time, could arrest Ryumin only after receiving "direct instructions of the Party Central Committee and the Soviet Government," then such "direct instructions" were all the more necessary to turn him over for trial...

...Two more factors should be noted: First of all, the trial of Ryumin lasted from July 2 to 7, i.e., six days...

...Basically, what was involved was a difference in attitude toward the whole complex of elements in Stalin's policy which led him in January 1953 to attempt to carry out another great purge...

...On the contrary...

...To answer this question, we must turn to events in the months preceding Stalin's death...

...It should be noted that Malenkov in the course of a year has crushed both the opponents of Stalin's aggressive foreign policy and the foes of the economic managers...

...Other regulations could easily have been found in the Criminal Code to cover the doctors' plot--for example, Point 10 in the same Article 58, which speaks of "exploitation of the religious or national prejudices of the masses...

...But the struggle against Beria was only one aspect of the Ryumin case...

...These lists can be compiled with a fair degree of completeness from the lists of persons receiving various decorations...

...In the light of the prior decision by the plenum, the fact that the trial took six days is especially interesting...

...it was Beria who made the "Jewish doctors' plot" the central point in the accusation...

...Ryumin was arrested on Beria's orders, and Pravda, commenting on the arrest in an editorial on April 6, 1953, described Ryumin's activities as an attempt "to inflame in Soviet society, which is welded together by moral-political unity and by the ideas of proletarian internationalism, feelings of national enmity which are profoundly alien to socialist ideology...

...Two conclusions should be drawn from this: that he was a comparatively young man and that he worked in the most secret recesses of the Stalinist apparatus, i.e., most likely in Stalin's personal secretariat...

...Since Stalin's purge was directed largely at Beria, Khrushchev was undoubtedly among the supporters of Poskrebyshev, and, since that time, his relations with Malenkov must have worsened...

...The intent of the organizers of this trial (i.e., in the final analysis, Malenkov himself) is perfectly clear...

...The present explanation of Ryumin's execution, of course, reflects the views of the present Malenkov-controlled majority of "the Party Central Committee and the Soviet Government...

...The fact that Ryumin was not tried until 15 months after his arrest shows that he had not only enemies who sought to send him to his death but also extremely influential defenders...

...It should be clear now just which "unjustifiable arrests" Ryumin carried out, other than the arrest of the doctors, and just which "provocational cases" he tried to set up just before Stalin's death put an end to the game...

...The second motivation was a campaign against the Communist economic managers, dictated by considerations of domestic policy and reflecting the struggle between the Party apparatus and the apparatus of the economic organs...

...of course, of Stalin himself...

...i.e., those responsible representatives of the dictatorship who permitted "enemy agents" to make their way into various Soviet institutions to carry on subversive work...

...The memory of the first "Yezhovshchina" is still too vivid even in these circles...

...After the execution of Ryumin, who was merely the executor of Stalin's will, it can be taken as conclusively established that Malenkov was an opponent of the "second Yezhovshchina...

...But so many different interests were involved in the Ryumin case that it played a great role in the struggle between them...

...A victory for Malenkov, a defeat for Khrushchev The Strange Death of Mikhail Ryumin By Boris I. Nicolaevsky TEH JULY 23 announcement of the shooting of Mikhail D. Ryumin, Soviet Deputy Minister of State Security in the last months of Stalin's life, produced considerable perplexity...

...His name is not to be found in the lists of prominent figures of the MVD-MGB or in the lists of responsible workers in the Party apparatus...

...The second item, even more interesting, is by Y. Chernomorsky, Berlin correspondent of the Ulm newspaper Ukrainskiye Vesti, who wrote on August 1, 1954 that Ryumin...

...It was Khrushchev who, after Beria's fall, gave Ignatyev the safe berth of Party Secretary in Bashkir Province...

...Pravda, of course, was setting forth the views of Beria, who then headed the dictatorship's police apparatus...

...Strangely enough, none of the commentators on the Ryumin affair bothered to decipher the juridical formulation of the charge which formed the basis of Ryumin's death sentence...

...But although they were allies in the struggle against the purge itself, Beria and Malenkov by no means agreed in their attitude toward the various elements in Stalin's policy which formed the basis of that purge...

...Article 58, Point 7 obviously has no connection with Ryumin's activities regarding the Jewish doctors, and it is clearly impossible to connect Ryumin's part in staging the doctors' plot with this article...

...During the 1949-53 period, as a Secretary of the Central Committee, he launched a struggle against Beria on the agricultural question...

...There is no doubt that the trial of Ryumin was a show trial aimed at the top levels of the Soviet regime, in order that they should clearly realize the danger which they had escaped...

...It was Beria who gave first place in the Ryumin case to the inflaming of "feelings of national enmity...

...If the regime had spoken in its execution announcement of the inflaming of "feelings of national enmity," this would have attested to its decision to wage war against anti-Semitism...

...as well as co-operatives" and "obstructed their normal activity...

...The entire Western press seems to agree that Ryumin was made a scapegoat, but no one has explained why this "goat" had to be shot when Ignatyev, his chief at the time of the "doctors' plot," had already been rehabilitated and Beria, the principal exposer of the false plot, had already been liquidated...

...Malenkov greatly helped Khrushchev in the first stages of his Party career, in the late 1920s and 1930s, and he saved Khrushchev from major misfortunes during the war...

...But there is no doubt that, at the top levels of the Party and Government bureaucracy, the details which emerged at the Ryumin trial will become widely known...

...Previous plenums in September 1953 and February 1954 were almost dominated by Khrushchev--his reports, his theses, his decisions, his stern criticisms of the representatives of the Government apparatus...