The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert Service

  Furthermore, the indoctrination of administrative, professional and intellectual functionaries was far from satisfactorily achieved. Some of them had ideas which sat uncomfortably alongside Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism and which came from a variety of sources. People were influenced by folk customs and by stories and memories recounted within families. Military veterans had had a glimpse of a different way of life abroad – and their conclusions were often to the USSR’s discredit. Many others continued to be motivated by national and religious traditions. Even officially-approved publications could give rise to un-Stalinist thoughts. Scientific textbooks propounded rules of investigation and validation at variance with Stalin’s claim that Marxism was based on premisses of eternal verity. Despite the heavy censorship exercised by Glavlit, moreover, citizens could glean unorthodox ideas from the approved Russian literary classics: Pushkin’s poems and Tolstoy’s novels teemed with discussions about religion, philosophy, nationhood and – last but not least – politics.

  Whether anything about this gave bother to Stalin is unknown; but certainly he acted to rearrange the pattern of Soviet politics. His despotic will was undiminished. When his personal physician V. N. Vinogradov advised him to run down his official duties on grounds of failing health, Stalin had him arrested. Stalin did not want others to know that he was no longer up to the job. He also turned against the chief of his bodyguards N. S. Vlasik and his personal assistant A. N. Poskrëbyshev. His isolation increased. He rarely saw his beloved daughter Svetlana and had not remarried since his second wife’s death in 1932. Stalin trusted nobody.

  As his suspicions grew, so too did his anti-Semitic tendencies. Several other Kremlin physicians were arrested in 1952 after being denounced by a certain Lidya Timashuk. Most of the thirteen detainees in this Doctors’ Plot had Jewish names and the tirades in the press against the ‘assassins in white coats’ produced an anti-Semitic hysteria. Individual Jews were subjected to verbal abuse by their neighbours throughout the country. It made no difference that many of them no longer practised their religion: the fact that their passports recorded them as Jewish made it easy for their persecutors to identify them. Meanwhile Stalin was giving confidential consideration to a scheme to round up all Jews and force them to live in the Jewish Autonomous Region established in eastern Siberia. Polina Zhemchuzhina, Molotov’s Jewish wife, was brought back from a camp and re-interrogated. The prospects for Soviet Jewry grew very bleak.

  Nevertheless Jews were not Stalin’s sole intended victims. The treatment of Zhemchuzhina raised the question how long it might be before Politburo member Molotov, too, would share her fate. Stalin also appeared to be planning to move against past and present leaders of the Soviet security organs. Beria was a notable potential target. In 1951, arrests had begun of party and governmental officials of Mingrelian origin. Mingrelians are an ethnic division of the Georgian nation, and the fact that Beria was their most famous son was not coincidental. A bloody purge of some kind was in the offing even though its exact nature and scale remained unclear. Almost certainly something broader than the Leningrad purge of 1949 was in Stalin’s mind. The shadow cast over Molotov and Beria might well eventually reach many other persons at the apex of the Soviet state. It cannot be excluded that his ultimate purpose was to conduct yet another great bloody purge of personnel in government, party, army and police.

  Probably his exact purposes will never be discovered. Certainly he did not confide them to the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952. The biggest event was the change of name from the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Stalin left it to Malenkov to give the Central Committee report; and the contributions not only by Malenkov but also by everyone else emphasized that Stalin’s wise leadership had their unanimous approval and gratitude. Apparently not the slightest disagreement on policy existed in the Kremlin.

  Yet while offering obeisance to the officially-tabled resolutions, Stalin’s associates used indirect language to indicate their respective differences of opinion. Malenkov wanted greater attention to be paid to light-industrial investment and to the development of intensive methods of agriculture. Beria highlighted the desirability of treating the non-Russians more carefully. After propounding his agricultural schemes, Khrushchëv declared that every party member should display ‘vigilance’: a conventional code-word for support of political repression. A careful reader of the Pravda reports could therefore discern that tensions existed at the apex of the Soviet communist party. Stalin made no attempt to arbitrate among them. Most of the delegates anyway did not care: they had come to the Congress mainly to catch a glimpse of Stalin and to pass the resolutions with unanimity. At the very mention of Stalin’s name they applauded, and several times in the course of the Congress they gave him standing ovations.

  Only at the Central Committee elected by the Congress did Stalin at last reveal his impatience. Firstly he asked to resign as Central Committee Secretary. Malenkov was chairing the session and turned white with dread lest the Central Committee members failed spontaneously to rise to their feet to deny Stalin his request. Luckily for him, they did.26

  Then Stalin gave an impromptu address. Still speaking of his weariness, he gave the impression that he knew this might be the last speech he made. In particular, he rambled through his memories of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918: ‘And what about Lenin? Just you read again what he said and what he wrote at that time. He let out a roar at that time, in so incredibly grievous a situation; he thundered, he was scared of no one. Thundered, he did.’ In almost the same breath Stalin considered his own career. While almost begging the Central Committee to compare him favourably with Lenin, he also wanted to appear as the party’s modest and dutiful leader. ‘Once this task has been entrusted to me,’ he declared, ‘I carry it through. But not in such a way that it’s accredited only to me. I’ve not been brought up that way.’27

  This was a man anticipating his obituary. Stalin, too, wanted to be remembered as a leader of courage and foresight, a leader who thundered. These were not the characteristics which immediately sprang to mind among those who knew him at close quarters and saw that he was not especially brave, foresightful or devoid in vanity.

  Weary or not, Stalin continued to pose a deadly threat to his colleagues. Halfway through his Central Committee address he suddenly accused Molotov and Mikoyan of political cowardice.28 They rejected his criticisms as tactfully as they could in the circumstances, and the topic was dropped. Nevertheless Central Committee members had been shocked by the episode. Many of them concluded that Stalin wanted at the very least to prevent these two veteran leaders from succeeding him. This impression was strengthened by other moves he made at the Central Committee plenum. For example, he redesignated the Politburo as a Presidium and increased the number of its members to twenty-five. The sinister aspect of the change was that Stalin simultaneously secured the appointment of a seven-person Bureau of the Presidium which, by involving mainly the younger leaders, would allow him to drop the veterans at a convenient moment in the future.

  Several central politicians already had reason to expect to be arrested before he collapsed in his dacha at Kuntsevo on 1 March 1953. The sudden, secret nature of his indisposition gave rise to rumours that someone, perhaps Beria, had ordered some skulduggery. Certainly Beria and fellow Politburo members took an unconscionably long time to make a serious attempt to resuscitate Stalin over the next few days.29 The kindest interpretation is that they were too afraid to intervene in decisions on his medical care. Finding him on the floor of his bedroom, they dithered as to what to do with his body; and after doctors pronounced him definitely dead on 5 March, there was much weeping over his passing. Their Boss had entranced as well as horrified them.

  Their grief was shared in homes and on the streets after the radio announcement was made on 6 March. Stalin’s funeral took place on Red Square three days later. Foreign statesmen attended as Molotov, Malenkov and Beria pronounced eulogies to the decease
d dictator. Molotov, despite having a wife held in prison on Stalin’s orders, was visibly distraught. Malenkov was better composed. But Beria in private dropped all pretence of respect for Stalin and cursed his memory. After the speeches, Stalin’s corpse, embalmed by experts from the same institute as had developed the technique for Lenin, was displayed in what was renamed as the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum. A silence was meant to descend over Moscow. But such was the crowd in the nearby streets that a commotion broke out. The pressure of bodies led to dozens of fatalities. From under the glass the chemically-treated corpse could still terminate innocent lives.

  And so Stalin’s accomplices came into a disturbing inheritance. It is true that the Soviet Union was still a superpower. It dominated Eastern Europe. It had the world’s second largest industrial capacity; its population was literate and acquiescent. The armed forces, the security organs, the party and the ministries of government were calmly able to confront their duties. If Soviet leaders were going to face trouble in 1953, it would arise only because they had grossly mishandled opinion among the élites or fallen out irretrievably among themselves – and the leaders could at least take consolation from the fact that Stalin’s death had pre-empted the immediate possibility of a massive purge that would lead to the deaths of leaders, their cliental groups and perhaps millions of other people.

  Yet enormous problems had been bequeathed by him, and not the least of them was agricultural. Malenkov had asserted at the Nineteenth Party Congress that wheat production had recovered to the level of 1940 and that the country’s grain problem had been solved ‘definitively and forever’. This was nonsense. The statistics were a wild exaggeration of reality since they were based upon what was known as the ‘biological yield’. This was a calculation derived from observations of the crop before it was harvested. Subsequent loss of grain in fact often occurred through bad weather; and it always took place because the harvest was stored so badly. Furthermore, whole regions of Russia had fallen out of cultivation. The kolkhozniks were under-paid and over-taxed, and the demographic structure of countless villages was distorted by the exodus of most able-bodied men and the young of both sexes. The neglect of rural problems could not be allowed to persist.

  Even the forced-labour system presented difficulty. Discontent was on the rise in the prisons, camps, colonies and ‘special settlements’ where 5.5 million prisoners were still held.30 A rebellion in Kolyma in 1949 was followed by another near Krasnoyarsk in 1951 and yet others in Labytnangi and Ozerlag in 1952.31 Permanent quiescence in the Gulag could no longer be taken for granted.

  At the same time it was questionable whether the ‘free’ industrial sector could continue as previously. Workers were too afraid to go on strike, but resented their conditions of labour, their low wages and poor diet and housing. There was little that administrators could do to make them more conscientious; and the administrators themselves were constrained by patterns of organization inimical to honesty and independent thought. Wasteful methods of production persisted in factories, mines and other enterprises. Stalin, furthermore, had rejected advice to invest substantially in chemical industries or in natural gas. His projections had become extremely inflexible. Capital goods in general and armaments in particular were given reinforced priority: expenditure on the armed forces, their weaponry and equipment, was forty-five per cent more in 1952 than two years earlier. This was a great strain upon the Soviet budget and was not indefinitely sustainable.

  National problems, too, had accumulated. Acute, lasting embitterment had been caused by Stalin’s deportations of nationalities during and after the Second World War; and the elevation of the prestige of the Russians above the other peoples of the USSR also caused lasting offence. Science and culture, too, were subjected to excessive supervision. Not only writers and scientists but also teachers, engineers, lawyers and managers worked in fear. Initiative from below was thwarted. The disgruntlement among administrative, professional and intellectual groups was intensifying. They especially wanted to work without fear of imprisonment. Only terror at the punitive repercussions held them back from complaining publicly.

  All in all, Stalin’s system of rule was not at its most effective when dealing with an increasingly complex society. The government, the party, the army and the security police – at metropolitan as well as local levels – were run on principles of the most rigid hierarchy. The scope for constructive consultation and collaboration had been severely reduced. The Soviet state as a whole was vastly over-centralized. Policies were decided by a tiny group of leaders, and the danger that they might blunder was acute. The leadership itself was subject to permanent intimidation; none of its members could fail to be mindful of the power of the security organs. For years the various Politburo members had taken objection to official policies but never dared to express themselves openly. Stalin had scared them rigid. In short, there was too much fear and too little trust for such a system to endure indefinitely.

  The world outside was also dangerous. East European nations resented their subjugation to the Soviet Union. The USA and its allies in NATO had no intention of rescuing them from this position; but resistance to further communist expansion was a firm objective. The Korean War was a suppurating sore in relations between the USSR and the USA.

  These were among the problems left behind by Stalin. They existed in every area of public life: politics, economy, ethnic relations, culture, security and continental and global power. And they complicated and aggravated each other. It is true that the Soviet order was not on the verge of collapse. But if several of these problems were not tackled within the next few years, a fundamental crisis would occur. Stalin’s legatees were justified in feeling nervous, and knew that the next few months would be a period of great trial for them. The uncontainable surge of crowds on to the streets of Red Square as he was laid to rest alongside Lenin in the joint Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum had been a warning to his successors about the passions lurking under society’s calm surface. This was the first act of self-assertion by the people since the inception of Stalin’s dictatorship. It was by no means clear how the Kremlin leaders would respond to the challenge.

  17

  ‘De-Stalinization’ (1953–1961)

  The people, however, had only a brief walk-on role in the drama. The major parts were jealously grabbed by Stalin’s veteran associates, who wanted to consolidate their positions of power as individuals and to preserve the compound of the Soviet order. Their common goals were to maintain the one-party, one-ideology state, to expand its economy, to control all public institutions and their personnel, to mobilize the rest of society, to secure the Soviet Union’s domination of Eastern Europe and to expand communist influence around the world. And several of these veterans were convinced that such goals were unattainable unless a reform programme were quickly to be implemented.

  There was dispute about this, but at first it did not matter because all the veteran leaders had a transcendent interest in securing their power at the expense of the younger rivals whom Stalin had promoted to high office. The veterans agreed tactics before convoking a combined meeting of the Council of Ministers, the USSR Supreme Soviet and the Party Central Committee on 6 March 1953. They had already decided among themselves on the size and composition of the various leading political bodies. In particular, they arranged a decrease in the number of members of the Presidium of the Central Committee from twenty-five to ten. The purpose of this was to remove the younger leaders from the Presidium and reduce their authority. Among the older figures who asserted themselves were the three leaders – Molotov, Mikoyan and Beria – who had appeared likely to be arrested before Stalin’s death.

  Malenkov benefited most from the new division of posts. He was appointed as both Chairman of the Council of Ministers and Party Central Committee Secretary. His Deputy Chairmen in the Council of Ministers were to be Beria and Molotov. Beria was to lead the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), and this institution was merged with the Ministry of State Security (MGB
) into an enlarged MVD. Molotov was promoted to Minister of Foreign Affairs and Khrushchëv kept his post as Party Central Committee Secretary. They were ruthless, ambitious men, but at the time there seemed little to stop Malenkov from becoming the dominant leader in succession to Stalin.

  While outward loyalty was shown to Stalin’s memory, his policies were already undergoing reconsideration. Malenkov wanted quieter relations with the West; he also favoured the boosting of industrial consumer-goods production and the intensification of agricultural techniques. Beria agreed with this and went further by demanding that concessions be made to the non-Russians in terms of political appointments in the USSR and that a lighter grip should be maintained in Eastern Europe (and secretly he resumed contact with Tito in Yugoslavia). Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchëv backed a curtailment of the security police’s arbitrariness. Khrushchëv’s particular priority was agriculture, and he urged the ploughing up of virgin lands in Kazakhstan as a cheap way to raise output rapidly. Only a couple of Presidium members, Molotov and Kaganovich, opposed reform. The dynamism in the central political leadership belonged to Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchëv.1

  Beria organized an exhibition for Central Committee members where tapes of Stalin’s conversations with the security police were played. Stalin’s guilt in arresting innocent officials was established.2 The general public had no access to the exhibition; but when the MVD announced that the accused professors in the Doctors’ Plot had been freed, it was evident that the Soviet supreme leadership wished to attenuate its reliance on terror. Articles appeared in Pravda proclaiming that the masses rather than single leaders made history. Marxism-Leninism was stated to be hostile to any ‘cult of the individual’ and to favour ‘collective leadership’. The barely disguised object of such commentary was Stalin.