by Norman Stone
Stalin had sunk monstrously into the consciousness and subconsciousness of the world, or at any rate the part of the world that he dominated. For eight years, since the end of the Second World War, his picture had been everywhere, huge statues had gone up to him, and secret-police chiefs all through the empire were kept vigilant at the idea that he might make a telephone call to them in the middle of the night — for his own working hours were strange. In the end, they killed him.
In 1953 Stalin was seventy-three and age was showing. The suspiciousness grew, and when his physical health seemed to be weakening, suspicion caused him to have his own doctors arrested, imprisoned, tortured to make them confess that there was a medical plot afoot. Then came signs that he was planning another culling of chief subordinates — Beria especially. In the 1930s, he had killed off three quarters of the Central Committee, along with much of the senior military establishment and then, for good measure, the chief of security who had organized it all. Now, the senior men could read the telltale signs that the old man was meditating another great purge. On the face of things, he could still be affable and welcoming, and on the night of 28 February/1 March he did stage one of his dinner parties, at which he liked people to get drunk (on one occasion a British ambassador had to be carried out). He told the servants not to wake him: he was usually around by midday in any event. But on 1 March, no. The bewildered staff did not know what to do, and, again because of the suspiciousness, there was no chief domestic secretary to take any responsibility; he had been carted off months before. The servants, with the 1,500 security guards posted all around, waited. A light finally did go on, at about six o’clock, in the quarters he had chosen for the night (out of suspicion, he changed his bedroom regularly, to foil would-be assassins). Then nothing more. Finally, since a document had arrived for him to read, a maid was sent into Stalin’s room. She found him on the floor, obviously victim of a stroke. He could hardly move or speak: only the terrible, malignant eyes had life in them.
Still no-one was prepared to take responsibility: the servants, the ministers they telephoned; only Beria could react. He told them to remain silent about the stroke, and arrived that night. The system being so strange, Stalin had remained for ten hours or so without medical attention, and now they had to go and ask his chief doctor in the special prison what he would advise. Beria himself at first told the guards to go, that Stalin was ‘sleeping’, and by the time doctors arrived, Stalin had been unattended for twelve hours. Did Beria do this deliberately? Stalin’s drunken son burst in, on 3 March, shrieked that they had killed him, and according to Molotov, Beria said as much: ‘I did away with him, I saved you all.’ As the old man slid into and out of coma, Beria did not bother to hide his hatred; by 3 March the doctors pronounced that there was no hope, and death came two days later, with a final scene that his daughter remembered:
He literally choked to death as we watched. At what seemed like the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry and full of the fear of death… He suddenly lifted his hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on us all
• the old housekeeper in hysterics, on her knees the while, as members of the Party executive came and went, and Beria, at the end, hardly able to control his glee.
Between themselves, before Stalin died, they managed to cobble together an agreement to take over the government, without any immediate fuss, and Beria emerged as the main man, with the Ministry of the Interior, to which would be attached the Ministry of State Security. Division of these two had been one of the signs that Stalin intended to strip Beria of his full powers, whittle him down and then eliminate him. In the same way, the new men reversed an arrangement that Stalin had made, to expand the size of the Party’s leading body, the ‘Praesidium’ (the old Politburo), to twenty-five as against an original ten. The ten older members would have been swamped by the new ones — an obvious way in which the old man could prepare to get rid of them. With at least some agreement, the new leaders were prepared to let the people know, at last, of Stalin’s death. The body was embalmed and laid out, and crowds upon crowds came to see it. Pandemonium followed, and hundreds of people were crushed to death in the middle of Moscow.
What were the new leaders to do? They were themselves Stalinists, involved in all of his doings, with hardly a scruple to be detected. The one with the worst record was obviously enough Beria, and the others had every reason to fear the power that he could use against them: one of the first things that he had done, when Stalin began to die, was to go and remove top-secret documents from the dictator’s desk. What did they contain? Already, said Khrushchev in his memoirs, his colleagues were wary, with little signs to each other of apprehension as to what Beria might do. They apportioned the various offices among themselves, and Khrushchev got what seemed to be the least of them — he was one among eight other secretaries of the Central Committee — while Georgy Malenkov took Stalin’s seat as head of the Council of Ministers. In the system, and the problem grew more complicated without a dictator, offices sometimes lacked the power that their names should have meant. Did the Party govern, and what was the role of the State in that event? And which part of the Party really had the power — the police or security element, later known as the KGB? These questions came up as soon as Stalin had died, and a struggle for power duly commenced.
However, to start with, there was a somewhat strange business. The Stalin tyranny began to be whittled down, and elements of liberalization came in. People started to come back from the huge prison camp network. Some, when arrested, had had the kind of acute intelligence that Communism fostered — a matter of survival, to guess what to do — and had confessed to crimes that were manifestly ridiculous. Thus, the director of the Leningrad Zoo had confessed that he had staged ballet rehearsals outside the cages so as to drive the monkeys mad. Any commission looking into ‘crimes’ would of course at once spot a preposterous one, and release the man. But there were other pieces of relaxation that touched on the two central themes of Soviet history from then onwards. These had to do with the non-Russian peoples on the one side, and relations with Germany on the other. Both themes now came up, and it was a measure of the strangeness of the system that the liberalizer, in both, was Beria, the man of Terror whom his colleages feared. However, given that this was a system in which information was very carefully doled out or distorted, the secret police were the agency best able to know what was going on, through a huge network of spies, and experts on various foreign countries. Beria knew well enough that the country was poor, sometimes famished, living in often disgusting conditions. Oppression at home and abroad cost an enormous amount, distorting production. Liberalization would solve some of this. Half of the USSR’s population consisted of non-Russians, and these had generally been run, tyrannically, through Russian Communists. In the Ukraine, where there had still been nationalist partisans fighting in the forests until very recently, Russians, not Ukrainians, had been trusted and in the Caucasus, the Baltic, Central Asia, it had been much the same. Whole peoples had been transported, in any event — the Chechens, for instance, to far-off Kazakhstan, along with the Tatars of the Crimea, who lost half of their population in the process (the Chechens, once they arrived, decided to reintroduce polygamy, so that their population could be restored). Now, Beria allowed some non-Russian Communists to take over, locally. Even in 1953 it caused head-shaking in Moscow. Stalin had survived Hitler’s attack largely because he put himself at the head of a Russian national movement, as distinct from a Communist one. What would happen if loyal Russians were now displaced by slippery Georgians and, worse still, Central Asians, who would use their power to instal their brothers and their cousins and their uncles through some hidden tribal or even sectarian network? Playing off the nationalities against Moscow was dangerous; in the end it brought down the USSR. There were pre-echoes of that in Beria’s post-Stalin months.
> But he also had a sense of strategy in foreign affairs. Stalin may have been absolute master at home, but he had the modern countries all against him, and a war was going on, pointlessly, in the middle of Korea. In 1945, when Hitler’s Germany had been smashed, the USSR had been in alliance with the West, and various arrangements for the post-war period had been drawn up. From Beria’s viewpoint, these had gone very badly wrong: the West had been misplayed. NATO now existed and it united western Europe, despite the existence in France and Italy of strong Communist parties; West Berlin was a leech attached to a main artery of the Soviet system; West German industry was recovering fast and would clearly be used for the rearmament of the country. The same was coming to pass in Japan. What had the USSR got in return for this? Peasant countries on her borders, each quite complicated. It had also gained East Germany, now dressed up as the ‘German Democratic Republic’, but everyone knew that it was a fake state. The chief element was that American troops were stationed in western Europe, that nuclear weaponry was in the air, that western Europe was overcoming the post-war crises, and American officials were all around, to encourage freer trade, both within Europe and with the USA. From Moscow’s viewpoint this was all very alarming, maybe presaging a general attack, and in his last years Stalin himself expected a war. Beria knew different: no-one knowing, through the extraordinarily highly placed Soviet spies, what was really being calculated in the West could have any serious idea that it would go to war. If NATO existed, if the Americans maintained a military presence in Europe, this was purely in response to Soviet provocations — a long list of cruelty and unnecessary aggression, including even the continued use of old Nazi concentration camps. There were still some idealists who chose to go and live in the ‘German Democratic Republic’, or ‘the other Germany’ — Bertolt Brecht the main one, though there were other men and women who had detested California. Disillusionment followed.
At this stage, German reunification was still a matter for diplomatic competition. The West argued for free elections, and meanwhile got the United Nations, which the West at the time controlled, to set up a commission to study the subject (it was refused entry to East Germany). At the time, there was also question of a German contribution to defence — the European Defence Community being the chief vehicle for this, and part of the post-Marshall arrangements that were the basis of the later European unification. This of course worried Moscow — she had always feared an alliance against her of the entire West, Germany included. Now, some of those same German generals who had reached Leningrad, Moscow, the lower Volga and the Caucasus were apparently being groomed again for an attack. Stalin himself had responded with a note, of 10 March 1952, which became famous, and over the interpretation of which some foolish historical statements have been made. He proposed the formation of a German government, to include the East; it would be recognized for the purposes of a peace treaty; Germany would be neutral, i.e. would not join any Western organization at all, including the economic ones; and might have her own army; and would be able to return civil and political rights. East German Communists proudly assured the Left-leaning Italian socialist Pietro Nenni that they would soon be in much the same position as the Italian Communist Party, i.e. waiting in the wings for power. Stalin also still had millions of prisoners in his thrall, whose return would be a considerable gift. The aim, overall, was at German national sentiment — there was even mention of giving political rights back to SS men — at the very moment when treaties signed in Bonn and Paris for a European army were supposed to be ratified, and the timing was not coincidental. The three Western powers consulted, and they then put the question as to free elections; they also said that a future German government should be free to choose alliances. The exchanges went on until September, always failing on these two points, since the USSR would never accept a united Germany, allied with the West, and despite some effort with the small print, never accepted that the elections would be really free. Anti-Cold War historians held the Stalin note up as evidence that the man was sincere about German neutrality and unification, ‘Finlandization’ as it came to be called, but subsequent evidence shows that he gave the matter much thought — the note went through fourteen versions, three of them annotated by him — and seems to have been possessed by the notion that he could deliver a Communist Germany, just as Czechoslovakia had produced a strong Party. The Party of Socialist Unity (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland, or SED) in East Germany was groomed for control of the entire country, and was told to accelerate ‘the construction of socialism’ in April 1950. The next Party congress, in July, went ahead with collectivization of agriculture, heavy-industrial plans and the extinction of small-scale trade and workshops. If Stalin did not get the Germany he wanted, he would in other words at least get his bit of Germany to fall into line.
In any event, the West Germans quite clearly preferred their freedom to their national unification. Adenauer, the Christian Democratic leader, was certain that there could be no honest arrangement with the USSR and was determined to go ahead with the Western programme, even if that meant accepting a divided Germany. He worried that the West might let him down, with some Allied conference that would leave Germany at Moscow’s mercy — some European security arrangement of the sort had even been suggested by an American Secretary of State (James F. Byrnes) in 1946. He also had an argument, that a prosperous and democratic West Germany would in the end act as a magnet for the East as a whole: and so indeed it did, though Adenauer (and the Frenchman, Schuman) were reckoning on up to ten years, and not nearly forty. The West Germans went ahead with rearmament plans and even conscription, although many of the Social Democrats detested the idea, as for that matter did some of the Christian Democrats. The French, too, had swallowed their doubts, despite threats of ‘Guns for Huns’. The Soviet side had offered (and Molotov stressed the offer again in 1954) some European security system that would include the USSR but exclude the USA and of course NATO Germany. This idea, to be launched with the sort of large international conference that the USSR could quite easily manipulate (the other countries being divided among themselves, with a number of small ones to cause trouble), was now in the air. It was ‘Europe for the Europeans’, and it later grew nuclear-free extrapolations; in time it became ‘our common European home’ — a famous enough expression, later on, under Gorbachev, but promoted before him by much harder men. The idea was not unpopular in some circles in Germany and elsewhere, and even had attractions on the Right. But there was one unshakably strong argument against it: Stalin and all his works, particularly the repulsive little state in East Germany. Its capital, East Berlin, had been rebuilt in homage to Moscow. The centre, the Alexander-Platz, was a gigantic field of concrete, and off it marched the Stalin-Allee, another hideous boulevard of concrete, with a peculiar smell, partly made-up of local low-quality coal and partly of the Soviet method of oil refinery. Along it went lorries, packed with rubble, and occasional large, curtained, black cars, carrying the unlovely Communist bosses. There was another peculiarity to East Berlin. Bomb damage did not mean that old buildings were torn down, as in the West. Instead, they were patched together, at least in areas such as the Schönhauser Allee or the Vinetastrasse, outside of the international gaze, ripe for ‘gentrification’ two generations down the line, but at the time almost uninhabitable. No German in his senses would want to live there.
The tensions of 1952 were such that Stalin was obviously thinking of a war, and he told Mao to prepare for one. Then came, perhaps in preparation for it, a new ‘purge’, both at home and in the satellite states, to dispose of potential traitors before they had time to act. He did not trust Jews at all, and they were, in the main, eliminated from leading positions in the satellite states, and from influential ones in Moscow, though the Budapest ones had an adhesive quality, and he sacrificed some gentiles instead. Paranoia of an extreme kind reigned, but Stalin was untouchable, had knees knocking, and his nominees, while secretly hating the system, could only wait for his d
eath.
Such was the position on 5 March 1953. Beria, with understanding from Georgy Malenkov, now moved into the vacuum, took charge of things, and had a strategy of his own. In the first place, Stalin’s crude challenges to the West had left no room for the divisions within it. We now know, for instance, that the Americans were not really using West Germany as a tool against the USSR: up to 1950, they regarded Bonn as a provisional solution, and one that had been forced upon them; they still used the machinery set up at Potsdam. But then had come the Korean War, and in 1952 Eisenhower was elected President on a strongly anti-Soviet platform: he seemed even to be saying that the USA should make use of its then enormous superiority in nuclear weapons. The Germans themselves were divided, and the one argument that Adenauer could always use was that East Germany was a tyrannically run place — no advertisement for life under ‘socialism’. The new leaders were clearly anxious to soften the line, and various things followed from this — on 27 March a limited amnesty (10,000 people, including Molotov’s Jewish wife); on 4 April, release of the imprisoned doctors of the ‘plot’; on 10 June, dropping of Soviet claims against Turkey; in June, resumption of relations with Yugoslavia and even Israel; in the same period, the Chinese at last made the vital concession in Korea, with an armistice declared in July. In fact, on 19 March the new leaders, including the true Stalinist Molotov, agreed that the Korean War must be stopped, and the Chinese foreign minister, Chou En-lai, got his orders to that effect on 21 March, in Moscow.
