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Though ‘the hunt was on’, as Khrushchev later put it, the Leningraders were initially left at liberty; Voznesensky was even still invited to Stalin’s drunken midnight dinners. Finally, on 13 August, Kuznetsov, Popkov and three others were invited to Malenkov’s office and arrested on arrival by his bodyguard. Though Voznesensky wrote a grovelling letter to Stalin — ‘Please give me work, whatever’s available, so I can do my share for Party and country. . I assure you that I have absolutely learned my lesson on party-mindedness’ — it did him no good.27 He was arrested in turn on 27 October and joined Popkov and Kuznetsov in a special prison. In September 1950 they were put on closed trial in Leningrad, in the old Officers’ Club building on the Liteiniy. Kuznetsov refused to confess and was immediately executed — according to Khrushchev ‘horribly, with a hook in the back of his neck’.28 Voznesensky may have been kept alive for a little longer. There is a story that a few months after the trial Stalin asked Malenkov what had become of the famously workaholic Planning Commission head, and suggested that he be given something to do. Malenkov replied that this would not be possible, since he had frozen to death in the back of a prison truck.29 Altogether, sixty-nine Leningrad-connected Party officials were executed, imprisoned or exiled between 1949 and 1951, plus 145 of their relatives. Least deserving of pity was P. N. Kubatkin, head of the Leningrad NKVD. The standard mugshots taken at his arrest — facing the camera and in right profile — show him haggard and dishevelled, just like his thousands of wartime victims.

Conducted in great secrecy, the ‘Leningrad Affair’ remains something of a mystery today. The pretexts for it, whispered in Stalin’s ear by Malenkov, were that Voznesensky had massaged production figures, and that the Leningrad Party had set up an agricultural trade fair without Moscow’s permission. In reality, it seems to have been the product of Cold War tension — 1949 was the year of the Berlin airlift, the founding of NATO and the Soviet Union’s first atom bomb — combined with Stalin’s fear of rivals. He may have been rattled by talk of a Leningrad-headquartered Russian (as opposed to all-Union) Communist Party, and by a friendly visit to the city by a delegation from Tito’s independent-minded Yugoslavia.30 Revisionists argue that the purge was a shrewd power play, reasserting Stalin’s supremacy and balancing the Kremlin factions. Conventionally, and more convincingly, it was simply one of the last spasms of an ageing, paranoid mind.

In parallel with the ‘Leningrad Affair’, Stalin also launched, again with Malenkov’s and Beria’s encouragement, a Union-wide ‘war on cosmopolitanism’. Wartime harnessing of traditional values — the return of military ranks and insignia, honours named for Suvorov and Nevsky — now curdled into virulent anti-Westernism. It was the era of crackpot pseudo-genetics, of ‘city’ instead of ‘French’ bread, and of boasts that Russians had invented the radio, the aeroplane and the light bulb. People with foreign connections or Jewish surnames began to vanish daily (‘It used to be a lottery’, quipped one, ‘now it’s a queue’),31 and at Leningrad University colleagues gathered once again to accuse each other of ‘formalism’, ‘bourgeois subjectivism’ or ‘bowing to the West’. ‘All the professors’, Olga Fridenberg wrote of her classics department,

were ritually humiliated. Some, like Zhirmunsky, endured it elegantly and with flair. . but Professor Tomashevsky, a man not yet old, of cool temperament and caustic wit, very calm and unsentimental, walked out into the corridor of the Academy of Sciences after his examination and fell into a dead faint. The folklorist Professor Azadovsky, already weakened by heart disease, lost consciousness during the meeting itself and had to be carried out.

It has been calculated that Union-wide, so many Jews lost their jobs that by 1951 they held less than 4 per cent of senior government, economic, media and university posts, down from 12 per cent in 1945.32 The highest-profile victim was Molotov’s luxury-loving fifty-three-year-old wife Polina, formerly People’s Commissar for fisheries. A grotesque pseudo-prosecution, involving accusations of Zionist espionage and group sex, ended with her divorce from Molotov and a five-year sentence to the camps. For all the ugliness Fridenberg found an ugly new word — ‘skloka’ — standing for ‘base, trivial hostility; spite, petty intrigues. It thrives on calumny, informing, spying, scheming, slander. . Skloka is the alpha and omega of our politics. Skloka is our method.’33