Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War by Nigel Cliff

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-Stalinmausoleum 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 who 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 ofunderage 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 Malenkovagreed 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.
    Three months after Stalin’s death, the plotters called ameeting of the Presidium at which Beria was the only item on the agenda. Beria protested in astonishment, but Malenkov laid out the charges. When he finished, he invited others to add their concerns, and Khrushchev launched into a foul-mouthed diatribe. “What’s going on, Nikita?” asked the startled Beria. After Stalin’s dinners, Beria had often taken Khrushchev home paralytically drunk and tucked him in his bed, which he had invariably wet. “Why are you searching for fleas in my trousers?”
    After two and a half hours, Malenkov pressed a concealed button that rang a buzzer outside. Zhukov burst in with ten officers and seized Beria. Apparently unprompted, a bodyguard blurted out that Beria had raped his twelve-year-old stepdaughter. In a typically Stalinist touch, the former security supremo was charged with being an agent of Anglo-American imperialism. When,