Stalin considers such rumors as a poruganiie—a desecration not only of his reputation but of the power to which he clings so dearly. Two men who learned the hard way how ruthlessly Stalin deals with those who attempt to usurp his power were Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his son Lev Sedov. Trotsky was once a trusted commissar of foreign affairs, just as Molotov is now. But the bond between Stalin and Trotsky was broken when their ideologies about the true nature of communism began to differ. Eventually, Trotsky was forced to flee Russia, taking up residence in Mexico. There he openly criticized Stalin, believing that he was safe from the long arm of the NKVD.

Trotsky was wrong.

In August 1940, NKVD agent Ramon Mercader attacked Trotsky in his home, plunging the sharp tip of an ice axe deep into the former revolutionary’s skull. Miraculously, Trotsky initially survived the blow, only to die one day later in the hospital.

Trotsky’s assassination mimicked that of his thirty-two-year-old son, Lev Sedov, two years earlier. At the time of his death, Sedov was on the NKVD execution list because he was arranging an international Communist conference in Paris that would celebrate his father’s, rather than Stalin’s, vision of communism.

Sedov suffered an acute attack of what appeared to be appendicitis in late January 1938. His symptoms mysteriously disappeared, then reappeared a few weeks later. Immediately, his best friend, an anthropologist named Mark Zborowski, informed Russian intelligence that Sedov had checked into a small Paris hospital known as the Clinique Mirabeau.

Unbeknownst to Sedov, Zborowski was an NKVD agent.

A few days after emerging from surgery, Sedov was in good spirits. He joked with his wife, Jeanne, and for several days was thought to be enjoying a normal recovery. But when his wife came to visit him on February 14, 1938, Sedov appeared listless.

“You know what they did to me last night?” he asked his wife. Suddenly, Sedov stopped talking, apparently unable to finish his thought. Two days later, to the horror of his wife, he died. An examination found strange purple bruising on his abdomen. Sedov was autopsied twice, but Parisian medical authorities ruled that he’d died from natural causes.3

The NKVD chiefs were relentless in their zeal to develop untraceable poisons. Beginning with Genrikh Yagoda; his successor, the reprehensible Nikolai Yezhov; and then the even more heinous Lavrentiy Beria, the ruthless spymasters pushed Soviet scientists to experiment with deadly toxins.4

The research was done at a top-secret laboratory known as the Kamera (“the Chamber”), where poisons of all kinds were tested on Russian political prisoners. The goal of the scientists working at the Kamera was to concoct an odorless, tasteless poison that would go undiscovered in case of an autopsy.

“We set ourselves the task of developing in the laboratory poisons so that they could be consumed using wine, drinks and food without modifying the taste or color of the food and drink,” one Russian official would testify at Yezhov’s secret trial in 1940.5 “It was also proposed that we invent fast-acting and slow-acting poisons but they had to have no visible impact on the body so that the autopsy on someone who had been poisoned would be unable to detect that the person had been poisoned.”

The Kamera came into being during Stalin’s reign of terror. Various poisons were used to silence enemies of the state. Now, as he endures his necessary time away from Moscow, Stalin has plenty of enemies in need of silencing. He lives like a monk as he plots the future. After spending each day in the gardens, the Boss spends his nights reading hand-carried reports from Moscow. He receives no visitors, and communicates with the outside world only through the occasional telephone call. Among the dossiers he receives each day are reports from Beria apprising him of the findings of the many NKVD surveillance teams hidden throughout occupied Europe. Stalin is already making plans to replace Zhukov as deputy minister of defense, and to humiliate Molotov before firing him as commissar of foreign affairs. As to relationships with the Western Allies, the time away from Moscow is giving Stalin an even greater resolve. “It is obvious that in dealing with such partners as the U.S. and Britain we cannot achieve anything serious if we begin to give in to intimidation or betray uncertainty,” he messages his top advisers in Moscow. “To get anything from this kind of partner, we must arm ourselves with the policy of stoikosti i vyderzhki”—“tenacity and steadfastness.”

The dacha in which Joseph Stalin now rests was built in 1934. Since then, he has personally signed the death warrants of forty thousand people—among them, political rivals, military officials, troublesome intellectuals, and personal enemies. Anyone who dares cross Joseph Stalin soon finds himself dead. All it takes is the stroke of a pen—and perhaps a lethal dose of untraceable poison.

*   *   *

Two thousand miles northwest of Stalin’s dacha, George S. Patton is restless. Many thoughts run through his mind now that it is no longer occupied by war. Patton understands that he is a famous person throughout the world, and that his future might lie in political activism—he’d rather be “outside the tent pissing in, than inside the tent pissing out,” in his own words. In a way, speaking out about controversial issues would give the general an opportunity to wage rhetorical war. Above all, Patton remains a warrior, but his battlefield may be changing.

And that prospect is not lost on his enemies, one of whom is currently resting in South Russia.

Another is dealing with captured Nazis at Nuremberg.

26

PALACE OF JUSTICE

NUREMBERG, GERMANY

NOVEMBER 20, 1945

10:00 A.M.

The crowd rises to its feet in Courtroom 600 as the Nuremberg war crimes trials get under way. Twenty of Nazi Germany’s most brutal leaders sit in the dock under a bank of hot floodlights so bright that each of the prisoners has been given sunglasses.1 Behind them, a row of white-helmeted American military police stand at crisp attention. The eight judges, two each from the United States, Britain, Russia, and France, take their seats at the front of the room. The proceedings begin with a reading of the twenty-four-thousand-word document listing the atrocities for which these men are being tried: the murder of one million Russians at Leningrad, the death of 780 Catholic priests at Mauthausen concentration camp, the machine-gunning of British POWs who were recaptured after their “Great Escape” from Stalag Luft III, and much more.

The litany of grisly indictments will take two full days to recount, and the Nazi prisoners soon grow bored. Some, such as Hitler’s former deputy führer Rudolf Hess, actually fall asleep.

Former Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering wears headphones to listen to an interpreter repeat what is being said. Arrogantly, he smirks as an accounting of his war crimes and tales of the art treasures he looted are read into the official court records. The formerly obese Reichsmarschall wears a simple gray uniform that hangs off him; he has lost seventy pounds since being taken prisoner. Goering is eager to speak in his own defense. Across the courtroom, he can see the deputy prosecutor, an American who has interviewed him for weeks. They have come to know each other quite well—so much so that Goering has confided stories about the sex lives of Germany’s greatest generals, and other salacious gossip, to his new friend, who speaks fluent German.

The Nuremberg courtroom

That prosecutor is none other than Wild Bill Donovan, the sixty-two-year-old major general, Medal of Honor winner, and chief of the OSS. The war may be over, but Donovan still has scores to settle. That is why he is here today. Many of his spies died at the hands of the Nazis, who also murdered countless innocent civilians as revenge for successful OSS operations. Donovan is relentlessly anti-Nazi, and began laying the groundwork for these trials as far back as October 1943, when he coaxed President Roosevelt into setting up a postwar apparatus for trying war criminals. It was two months later, in the spirit of Allied cooperation, that Donovan flew to Moscow and began forging a relationship between the OSS and the NKVD.