In late 1948, Stalin demanded that Molotov divorced his wife Polina Zhemchuzina.
The couple duly obliged.
Zhemchuzina was an old Bolshevik and the Minister of Fisheries.
Soon, she was expelled from the party and then arrested.
Zhemchuzina was Jewish.
She fell victim to her connections with the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia.
She also made a mistake of greeting too warmly
In Stalin's view, Golda Meir.
Meir came to Moscow in 1948 as the first ambassador of Israel.
Here you see a crowd of
happy Moscow Jews in front of a synagogue which Golda Meir attended.
The charges against Zhemchuzina were part of
a campaign of state anti-Semitism which Stalin launched at the time.
When the Central Committee voted for Zhemchuzina's expulsion,
Molotov abstained, another huge mistake.
He almost immediately wrote a letter to Stalin expressing his remorse.
This did not help.
In 1949, Molotov was dismissed as
Foreign Affairs Minister and Mikoyan was dismissed as Minister for Foreign Trade.
It is just worth mentioning that both Molotov and Zhemchuzina remained
ardent Stalinists until the end of their lives.
One of Stalin's priorities in the 1950s was the shake-up of his security apparatus.
In 1951, he had his own very recent protégé,
a Minister of State Security Victor Abakumov, arrested.
This started a large-scale purge in the ministry.
The new minister, Semen Ignatiev,
was instructed to kick all of the Jews out.
Several Zionist plots were immediately uncovered in the ministry.
Series of arrests followed.
Part of this purge was the so-called Mingrelian affair.
Dozens of top security and party officials in Georgia were arrested.
They were accused of favoring the Mingrels.
Who were the Mingrels?
They were an ethnic group in Georgia.
Then evidence was fabricated of the anti-Soviet and espionage activities and
some were executed and 11,000 were deported to the remote areas of the Soviet Union.
As on the case with the Leningrad affair,
the Georgian arrests targeted a particular figure in Stalin's entourage.
This time it was Beria again, himself a Mingrel.
In a typically jesuitic manner, in 1952,
Stalin made Beria chair of a plenum of Georgia's Central Committee.
Beria had to expose and denounce his friends and
clients who now fell victims to the purge.
He survived but was further politically damaged.
Stalin's main move in rebalancing
the influence among his entourage was saved for the 19th party congress,
or rather, for the plenum of the new Central Committee elected at the Congress.
Here is Stalin at the 19th Congress of the party.
He's completely alone, nobody next to him.
He doesn't want anybody right next to him.
The Congress was convened in October 1952 after a 13-year break.
The plenum set right after it.
At the plenum, Stalin announced the abolition of the Politburo
of the Central Committee and the creation of two new bodies.
The first body was the Presidium of the Central Committee,
consisting of 25 full members and 11 candidates.
The second was a nine-member bureau which was to lead the Presidium.
The main purpose of the numerical expansions of
the party leadership was to diminish the influence of Stalin's old wartime guard.
The members of the Presidium,
new members of the Presidium,
younger people without a following or a clout,
were better suited to carry out Stalin's orders.
The situation changed.
It was a new post-war situation,
so new people had to be brought in.
As for Bulganin, Beria and Malenkov, they were still in,
but Molotov and Mikoyan were both excluded.
Moreover, at the plenum,
Stalin publicly denounced both for their various transgressions.
Both were accused of rightist opportunism:
Mikoyan for the proposal to raise the grain procurement prices,
Molotov for conceding too much to the foreign allies.
Both came to the podium and tried to assure the leader of their devotion to him,
but they were not allowed to speak.
Stalin dismissively waved his hand and the audience started to yell,
enough of your self-justifications.
The plenum was painfully reminiscent of Stalin's struggle with
the oppositions in the 1920s and of the early stages of the purges in the 1930s.
None of Stalin's associates could feel safe anymore.
But for the time being,
Molotov and Mikoyan were left with their lives and even with some of their possessions.
At the plenum, Stalin asked to release him from
the position of the general secretary of the party.
Malenkov, who chaired the session,
stood behind him and the audience saw how horrified he was.
They understood what they had to do.
So the audience shouted,
"No, we won't allow you to go.
Stay." This was obviously what Stalin wanted to hear.