Stalin

6 THE GENERALISSIMO

Victory elevated Stalin to unprecedented heights. The exultant show of military might that paraded across Red Square in June 1945 was an important symbol of his new power, now more secure than ever and legitimized with the title of generalissimo. But Stalin was a seasoned enough politician to know that victory, which had transformed the Red Army into one of the most formidable forces on the planet, was just the first step on the long and difficult postwar path toward regaining and holding the country’s status as a world power. The Soviet Union was a weakened nation. The extent of suffering and devastation that had befallen it is almost unimaginable. Contemporary demographers speak of 27 million lives lost, and many of those lives were young—the country’s future. Thousands of towns and villages lay in ruins, and many people were forced to improvise some form of shelter. Several million wounded veterans needed government support. The demobilization of an army of 11 million and the transition to a peacetime economy also demanded significant resources. The postwar famine—a tragic testament to the devastation wreaked on collectivized agriculture and to the weakness of the Stalinist distribution system—peaked in 1946–1947. As many as 1.5 million people died of hunger or disease. Many millions were afflicted by dystrophy and other serious illnesses causing permanent disability. As usual, cannibalism raised its ugly head during the famine years. To all these hardships were added desperate guerrilla wars in western Ukraine and the Baltic states, territories that had been absorbed into the Soviet Union on the eve of the war and given a taste of Stalinist terror.

There was also a whole new set of international challenges. Relations with the Allies had cooled considerably. Stalin’s Soviet Union and the Western democracies, brought together in a marriage of convenience by Nazi aggression, had little in common. Negotiations to resolve the postwar repartition of the world opened up new areas of contention, but the Soviet Union was too weak to put up a decisive fight. It was unnerved by the United States’ nuclear monopoly and devoted huge resources to ending it.

A particular danger facing the Stalinist regime was the incongruity between the symbolic triumph of victory for Soviet society and the hard realities of daily life. The war had taken millions of Soviet citizens beyond the country’s borders to Europe, an experience that many found shocking. The victors saw that the slaves of capitalism enjoyed a standard of living immeasurably better than theirs. They now knew that for years official Soviet propaganda had been pulling the wool over their eyes. Tens of millions of peasants, many of whom had fought in the war, dreamed of dismantling the kolkhoz system and believed that their sacrifices at the front had earned them this reward. A threatening gulf was opening up between the Soviet people’s postwar expectations and their reality. As they struggled to overcome extreme daily hardships, mourned the dead, and listened to stories from returning soldiers, people’s conversations inevitably drifted toward ideas and topics that were taboo: the price of war and victory, the questionable privileges enjoyed by party and government officials, and the causes of hunger and deprivation. The system’s usual response to such “incorrect” thinking was arrest and prosecution for “anti-Soviet propaganda.” But would that response work in the new, postwar USSR?

Apparently Stalin was not sure how to address these challenges. In the immediate aftermath of victory, he sent mixed messages to the country, including hints at a coming liberalization. Take, for example, the remarks made at a reception honoring Red Army commanders on 24 May 1945:

Our government made more than a few mistakes; there were moments of desperation in 1941–1942, when our army was on the retreat, abandoning our native villages and cities.… Another people might have told its government: you have not met our expectations; go away; we will put another government in your place that will sign a truce with Germany and ensure us peace. But the Russian people did not choose to do that since they believed in the correctness of their government’s policies and chose to make sacrifices in order to secure the destruction of Germany. And this trust the Russian people placed in the Soviet government proved to be the decisive force that secured a historic victory against an enemy of humanity—against fascism. Thanks to the Russian people for this trust!¹

This hint of penitence was an effective gesture by a confident, popular, and triumphant leader. But soon Stalin began to sense that such statements could be perilous. They opened the door to discussion of critical questions about the past war, and echoes of these discussions were starting to reach him. In November 1945, he was told about a letter from a propagandist in the Buriat-Mongol republic who was being asked during lectures just what Stalin meant when he mentioned mistakes by the Soviet government: “I, of course, was not able to answer this question.… I earnestly ask you, Com. Stalin, for your explanation as to what should be the answer to this question.”² More to the point was a letter from N. M. Khmelkov from the village of Maly Uzen in Saratov Oblast that asked, “How could we allow it to happen that when the war broke out the German Army was better armed than our army?” Khmelkov recalled prewar promises that the Red Army would soon be fighting “on the territory from which the enemy comes” and concluded by asking Stalin a central question, the validity of which Stalinists reject to this day: “Victors are not judged. But a victorious people is obliged to figure out whether victory was achieved with the least possible expenditure of effort and resources and with the fewest possible casualties, and if it was not, then why: were we given too little time to prepare for war, were the cogs in a complex machine operating poorly … and failing its more complicated parts?”³ Stalin instructed that Khmelkov’s letter be filed away.⁴ He had no intention of responding to such questions or “figuring out” what mistakes the government might have made. To forestall undesirable discussion of the price of victory, the performance of the military leadership, and hopes for postwar liberalization, he launched a series of ideological counterattacks.

The first of these was a reappraisal of the toll taken by the war and the reasons for defeat. In an obvious attempt to downplay the nation’s losses, in March 1946 Stalin officially stated that “as a result of the German invasion, the Soviet Union irretrievably lost approximately 7 million in fighting with the Germans and because of the German occupation and the driving of Soviet people into German hard labor.”⁵ This was a strange number to pick, and it was far from accurate, but it is possible to see how Stalin might have arrived at it. According to General Staff estimates, approximately 7 million Red Army soldiers were killed in the war or died of wounds and disease.⁶ He must have known that he was distorting the truth when he included the victims of occupation and those taken to work in Nazi labor camps in this figure. Soviet war losses no longer looked quite so terrible, and the matter was put to rest for many years.

While it may have been easy enough to hide the true number of Soviet war dead, the Red Army’s catastrophic retreat was another matter. How had the Germans been able to advance all the way to the Volga? At best, discussion of this ignominious episode could be suppressed. The horrible defeats suffered during the war’s first eighteen months cast a shameful light on the regime and on Stalin himself, diminishing his stature as the architect of victory. Soviet propaganda had a few stock arguments to explain those early defeats: the might of Hitler’s war machine, which enslaved Europe; the fact that the Red Army had not finished rearming; and the Nazis’ perfidious surprise attack. Apparently Stalin felt these arguments were not enough. Cautiously and gradually, he tried to introduce another idea into the propaganda arsenal, one that exonerated him as supreme commander: that the Red Army’s retreat was a calculated move designed to wear down the enemy. There was a well-known historical precedent that made this argument understandable and familiar: Kutuzov’s 1812 strategy of allowing Napoleon’s army to enter deep into Russian territory, even relinquishing Moscow, before counterattacking, a strategy that is credited with preserving the army and saving the country.

An opportunity to promote this new way of explaining the retreat came in the form of a letter Stalin received in early 1946 from Ye. A. Razin, a military academy instructor. Razin was writing the vozhd with general questions about doctrine, but Stalin responded in a letter by offering specific and far-reaching guidelines for understanding Soviet military history. He underscored two central ideas. First, Lenin was not “an expert in the military sciences” during the Civil War years or at any other time. Thus Stalin was the only Soviet leader who qualified as a true commander in chief. The second idea offered a more favorable interpretation of the early, catastrophic stage of the war. “A retreat, under certain disadvantageous conditions,” Stalin wrote, “is just as legitimate a form of combat as an offensive.” He noted the need to take a closer look at the counteroffensive “after an enemy’s successful offensive, [when] the defender gathers strength, switches to a counteroffensive, and hands the enemy a decisive defeat.” Bolstering this idea with historical parallels, Stalin cited the example of the ancient Parthians, who “lured” Roman forces deep inside their country and then “struck with a counteroffensive and annihilated them.” He also offered the example of Kutuzov’s counteroffensive against the French, calling him a “brilliant” commander.⁷

Of course, Stalin did not draw a direct line between these historical precedents and the events of 1941–1942, but the implication was obvious. The defeats of the war’s first stage were transformed into a manageable phase of preparation for a counteroffensive, a “legitimate form of combat,” and not a catastrophe caused by egregious blunders at the top or a broken chain of command. Aware of the questionable validity of this recontextualization, Stalin did not widely disseminate his letter at first. It was written in late February 1946 but not published until a year later.

The letter to Razin contained another thought that preoccupied Stalin in the first months after the war: the need to avoid “kowtowing to the West,” including showing “unwarranted respect” for the “military authorities of Germany.” The first expression of this sentiment is found in a letter written by Stalin during the autumn of 1945 to his comrades in Moscow while he was vacationing in the south. Denouncing unnamed “senior officials” who were “thrown into fits of childlike glee” by praise from foreign leaders, he wrote, “I consider such inclinations to be dangerous since they develop in us kowtowing to foreign figures. A ruthless fight must be waged against obsequiousness toward foreigners.”⁸

These loosely formulated ideas were Stalin’s response to the “contamination” of Soviet society by the ideological influence of the Western allies and to the danger of an inferiority complex on the part of the impoverished victors. Over time, the “fight against kowtowing” took the form of specific campaigns and institutions. In August 1946 a Central Committee resolution was published on “The Magazines Zvezda and Leningrad” in support of an irate speech to Leningrad writers delivered by Central Committee secretary Andrei Zhdanov. The targets of his ire were the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova. The former’s writings, according to Zhdanov, were poisoned by the “venom of a brutish hostility to the Soviet system.” Akhmatova was labeled a “whore and a nun, in whom licentiousness is combined with prayer.”⁹ Discussion of the resolution was made mandatory at party meetings across the country—in regional party organizations, factories, and kolkhozes—and marked the beginning of a severe scolding given to the creative intelligentsia.

A leitmotif of the attack on writers was the unmasking of “kowtowing to the contemporary bourgeois culture of the West”—a formulation that clearly came from Stalin’s own pen. Indeed, archival documents show that Stalin was behind Zhdanov’s vitriol and that he read and edited his speech.¹⁰ The archives further reveal that Stalin was the driving force behind other actions designed to promote ideological lockstep, such as the well-known case of the married scientists Nina Kliueva and Grigory Roskin, who were developing a cancer drug in Moscow. In 1947 they were ground-lessly accused of passing secret information to the Americans. The couple was accused of “kowtowing and servility to anything foreign.”¹¹

These shrill ideological clichés were variations on the canonical themes of Leninism and Stalinism: the USSR, since it was building the most advanced social system, would always and in all respects surpass the rest of the world; the capitalist powers, sensing their inevitable demise, would be ready at any moment to unleash war against the birthplace of socialism. The recent war and the gradual move toward a new “cold” war served to confirm this thinking.

Many years of research, especially since the archives of the former USSR and other countries of the socialist bloc have opened up, have provided a wealth of information on the origins of the Cold War. Nevertheless, scholars may never reach agreement about its real causes, which side should take the larger share of blame, and the true motives and calculations of the opposing powers. The Cold War was more a gradual evolution than an event with a clear beginning. The world leaders involved in this process were not simply looking out for their countries’ fundamental interests, but were also reacting to specific, often unexpected situations with decisions that were often illogical. Stalin was no exception.

The intensifying conflict between the World War II Allies was fed by the utter incompatibility of their systems, their competing desires to expand their spheres of influence, mutual grievances dating to the prewar years, and a shared need for a foreign enemy. Specific issues tended to exacerbate the general suspicion and animosity. America’s nuclear monopoly and its reluctance to let the Russians take part in the occupation of Japan were among the many frustrations Stalin felt in dealing with the United States. In a meeting with Averell Harriman at the Soviet leader’s southern dacha in October 1945, Stalin angrily wondered out loud whether the United States “needs not an ally but a satellite in Japan? I must say that the Soviet Union is not suited to that role.… It would be more honorable for the USSR to leave Japan entirely rather than remain there like a piece of furniture.”¹² For his part, Stalin angered Western leaders, already fundamentally opposed to Soviet communism, with his thinly veiled desire to sovietize Eastern Europe using the Red Army and local Communists.

It is hard to imagine what mutual concessions might have prevented a breakdown in relations between two such different systems. Such a breakdown could only be delayed by tactical calculations and political factors, including the illusion on the part of Western public opinion that an enduring alliance was actually feasible (Soviet public opinion had little say in the matter). Relations also remained civil so long as Stalin harbored hope for Western concessions, particularly in the areas of economic aid and reparations from Germany. The devastation and famine afflicting the USSR after the war made the need for assistance particularly pressing. That Eastern Europe—now within the Soviet sphere of influence—not only suffered its own famine and devastation but was also home to significant anti-Communist sentiment also forced him to act with circumspection.

Stalin was restrained in his personal relations with Western leaders. He preferred to let Molotov take hard-line stances during diplomatic negotiations, while he himself would periodically step in and make demonstrative concessions that allowed the Western side to save face or prevented it from breaking off talks. As during the war, Stalin tried to play the Americans and British against one another. In April 1946, after Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, Stalin met with the U.S. ambassador in Moscow. After accepting the gifts of a safety razor and transistor radio, Stalin offered a “friendly” warning: In pursuing their own interests, “Churchill and his friends” might try to push the United States away from the USSR.¹³

Such face-to-face diplomacy was no match for the powerful forces at play. Truman responded to Soviet attempts to gain footholds in Iran, Turkey, and Greece with a plan to help rebuild Europe, the centerpiece of which became known as the Marshall Plan. Stalin responded by turning down the aid offered under the plan (as did other East European states, under Soviet pressure) and by creating an international Communist organization, the Cominform. During the Cominform’s first conference, Zhdanov echoed Stalin’s idea that the world was being divided into “two camps.”¹⁴ Efforts to sustain the wartime alliance gave way to the traditional call to stand up to “international imperialism.”

On the domestic side, the return to prewar political thinking and practices occurred even earlier. Stalin’s conservative inclinations played no small role. Given the array of complex problems facing him, as he approached his seventieth birthday, he neither took an interest in reforms or experiments nor saw any reason to change his country’s long-range goals for economic development. He offered a number of production targets in a speech to an election meeting on 9 February 1946: 500 million tons of coal, 60 million tons of steel, 50 million tons of cast iron, 60 million tons of petroleum. Considering the actual figures for 1946—only 13.3 million tons of steel and 9.9 million tons of cast iron were produced, along with 163.8 million tons of coal and 21.7 million tons of petroleum—such targets were obviously wildly ambitious. Furthermore, as the economic historian Eugene Zaleski has noted, a program like Stalin’s, purely focused on output targets, reflected a simplistic understanding of economic development.¹⁵

Stalin showed his preference for tried and true methods during the famine of 1946–1947, when, as in 1932, draconian laws were enacted against the pilfering of state property. Two 4 June 1947 decrees provided for sentences ranging from five to twenty-five years in a camp for theft. Between 1947 and 1952, more than 2 million people were convicted of this charge. Many if not most were simply ordinary people who committed minor crimes in the face of great material deprivation. Parents who stole a loaf of bread for their hungry children were sentenced to many years in a camp. Mass repression was not limited to the prosecution of theft. Arrests for political crimes continued, and harsh laws were also put in place to combat violations of workplace discipline. Approximately 7 million such sentences, an average of 1 million per year, were handed down between 1946 and 1952.¹⁶ In Stalin’s last years, the Gulag grew into a sprawling network that played a central role in the life of the country. On 1 January 1953, more than 2.5 million people were being held in camps, penal colonies, and prisons. “Special settlements” in remote regions held another 2.8 million.¹⁷ Some 3 percent of the population was either incarcerated or under internal exile.¹⁸

Mass repression, in the form of large-scale arrests, executions, and internal exile, was now largely focused on the newly absorbed parts of the Soviet Union, where fierce guerrilla campaigns raged. Stalin received regular reports on the pacification of mutinous areas.¹⁹ For the years 1944–1952, according to incomplete official statistics, approximately a half million people were killed, arrested, or forcibly exiled from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, along with an equal number in the western provinces of Ukraine.²⁰ For these small republics and provinces, whose populations totaled just a few million, these were astounding numbers. The Stalinist system had neither changed nor grown less repressive.

 KEEPING THE LEADERS IN THEIR PLACE

An important aspect of Stalin’s postwar consolidation of power was a return to routine shake-ups at the upper echelons of government and the preemptive humiliation of his devoted and obedient comrades. The stable leadership that had governed the country during the war was probably perceived by Stalin as a compromise necessitated by circumstances. Now that they had performed their tasks, he no longer needed influential marshals and members of the State Defense Committee. And as his physical state declined, his tendency toward suspicion grew.

On 9 October 1945 the Politburo adopted a resolution granting Stalin a vacation so that he could “rest for a month and a half.”²¹ This was his first trip to the south in nine years, and he may have left reluctantly. The foreign press was full of speculation. On 11 October he received a set of TASS news synopses regarding talk in the West about his poor health and the jockeying for position among potential successors. According to the summary, the Chicago Tribune’s London correspondent, citing diplomatic sources, wrote about a bitter behind-the-scenes power struggle between Zhukov and Molotov, both vying to replace Stalin. Zhukov was supposedly supported by the army and Molotov by the party apparat.²² A week later, the TASS synopsis included a statement by the Soviet ambassador in France: “Over the past ten months we have been asked fifteen times to confirm reports of Stalin’s death.” An article about Molotov in a Norwegian newspaper stated that “For public opinion in the U.S.A., England, and other freedom-loving peoples, Molotov represents a new, strong Soviet Union that demands the status of an equal among the world’s great powers.”²³ Stalin was not mentioned. The article spoke only of his successors.

These foreign press reports reflected the Western view of the postwar configuration of power. The long and horrific war was receding into history, as were the leaders who had achieved victory. Roosevelt was dead. The defeat of the Conservative Party in Great Britain had sent Churchill into retirement. Stalin was aging and rumored to be ill. For the Western observer, these were all elements of the same coherent picture. Stalin, of course, did not share this view. Any hint that the Soviet leader might be replaced only heightened his indignation and suspicion, the brunt of which was borne by his closest comrades—primarily Molotov, as he was first on the list of possible successors. Attacks against Molotov were also a convenient pretext for another shake-up. The ruling Five throughout the war had consisted of Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Malenkov, and Mikoyan. This grouping had been in place uncomfortably long.

Stalin’s growing irritation with Molotov was on full display during the September 1945 meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers in London, convened to discuss the new postwar order and peace terms with the vanquished countries.²⁴ At the outset, Molotov took a liberty in regard to a procedural question. Yielding to a request by the Western Allies, he agreed that in addition to the Soviet Union, United States, and Great Britain, France and China would also be allowed to take part in the drafting of treaties. Under previous agreements, France and China were to be involved in designing terms only with Italy and Japan respectively. Molotov did not see a problem with this change, and strictly speaking there was none. France and China would only offer input on the treaties; they were not given any vote on their approval. Agreeing to this arrangement made perfect sense. Hoping for a productive meeting, Molotov did not want to waste time by provoking conflict over secondary questions.

His concession would likely have gone unremarked had the negotiations not reached a seemingly insuperable stalemate. Stalin demanded that the Soviet Union be given a real role in deciding the fate of Japan. The Western side would not even place that question on the agenda. Stalin demanded that one of Italy’s colonies in North Africa be placed under Soviet trusteeship, thus giving his country a solid foothold on the Mediterranean. The Western side refused. The sides also reached an impasse over Romania and Bulgaria. Considering these countries “satellites” (Stalin actually used the cognate in a telegram he sent to Molotov during the meeting), the Soviet authorities had already installed pro-Communist governments there.²⁵ The United States and Great Britain refused to recognize these governments or sign any accords with them. Stalin decided to increase pressure on his partners, even when it looked as if talks might break down. The question about France and China, whose participation was supported by the United States and Great Britain, offered a convenient pretext. On 21 September Stalin reprimanded Molotov for his procedural concession, and Molotov repented: “I admit that I committed a grave oversight. I will take immediate measures.”²⁶ The following day he withdrew his agreement. The Western Allies were enraged. On the surface it looked as if this simple procedural question had brought the talks to a standstill.

This incident vividly illustrates Stalin’s manipulative personality. While cultivating the image of a moderate and predictable politician in the eyes of his fellow Allies, he forced his comrades to do his dirty work. He was incensed when Molotov revealed that the withdrawal of consent for France’s and China’s participation came on his orders. For a long time afterward he reminded Molotov of this and similar instances, accusing him of trying to present himself as a reasonable alternative to the inflexibility of “the Soviet government and Stalin.”²⁷

These potshots at Molotov were a sign that a more serious attack was on the way. An essential role was played in this drama by the TASS summaries of the foreign press, which Stalin pored over during his vacation. Molotov’s troubles began with a 1 December 1945 news item by a correspondent for Britain’s Daily Herald, reporting rumors that Stalin might be stepping down as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and that Molotov might resume that post. The TASS summary quoted the correspondent as saying that the political leadership of the Soviet Union was currently in Molotov’s hands, with general directives from the Politburo.²⁸ For Molotov, nothing could have been more damaging, especially when Stalin was out of Moscow for the first time in years. Furious, on 2 December Stalin telephoned Molotov to demand that more stringent censorship be exercised over the dispatches sent out by foreign correspondents. Molotov gave the foreign affairs commissariat’s press office the appropriate orders.²⁹ The next day, however, there was a bureaucratic snafu. The TASS summary for 3 December included a New York Times piece that had been published on 1 December, before Stalin’s order to tighten control. The Times item, like the Daily Herald article, hinted at discord among the Soviet leadership and a weakening of Stalin’s position.³⁰ Stalin read the TASS account of the Times article on 5 December. Apparently that same day he read a 3 December Reuters report that mentioned a relaxing of censorship in regard to foreign correspondents in the USSR. The press agency claimed that after Western journalists collectively had complained to the Soviet authorities, Molotov had said to an American at a 7 November reception, “I know that you correspondents want to get rid of Russian censorship. What would you say if I agreed to this on condition of reciprocity?” A few days later, according to Reuters, the Western press corps actually did see signs of relaxed control.³¹

These reports gave Stalin more than enough ammunition to charge Molotov with scheming against him. On 5 December the vozhd sent Molotov, Beria, Mikoyan, and Malenkov a telegram demanding that the matter be investigated.³² The following day the four sent Stalin a detailed response. The New York Times article had a simple explanation. It had gone through censorship on 30 November, three days before Stalin asked Molotov to tighten control. The explanation for the Reuters report was just as persuasive. Molotov really had ordered a relaxation of censorship in November since the censors “often unnecessarily marked out individual words and expressions in the telegrams sent by foreign correspondents.” As for the conversation at the 7 November reception, Molotov claimed that “words were attributed to him that he did not say.”³³

After receiving this response, Stalin went into a rage, either genuine or feigned. That same day, 6 December, he sent a sharply worded telegram to Moscow. Ignoring all the reasonable arguments offered by the four, he stated that Molotov bore the blame for the appearance of “libels against the Soviet government” in the foreign press. Furthermore, Molotov’s liberal attitude toward foreign correspondents represented an intentional effort to change “the course of our policies.” After accusing Malenkov, Beria, and Mikoyan of connivance, Stalin directed extremely harsh words at Molotov. “I am convinced that Molotov does not care about the interests of our state and the prestige of our government,” he wrote, “so long as he gains popularity within certain foreign circles. I can no longer consider such a comrade to be my first deputy.” To add insult to injury, Stalin sent his telegram only to Malenkov, Beria, and Mikoyan, asking them to summon Molotov and read him its contents but not give him a copy. The reason he gave was extremely insulting to Molotov: “I did not send [the telegram] to Molotov since I have doubts about some of those close to him.”³⁴

This telegram contained the strongest accusations Stalin had ever made against a member of his inner circle (unless, of course, we include the Politburo members whom he had executed). The four men were undoubtedly frightened. On 7 December Beria, Malenkov, and Mikoyan sent Stalin a coded telegram in which they reported on the firm approach they had taken in dealing with their associate. “We summoned Molotov to us and read him the telegram in full. After pausing to think, Molotov said that he had made a lot of mistakes but felt that mistrust toward him was unjust, and then he began to cry.”³⁵ There is no way to know whether they were describing this confrontation accurately. This was a drama played out for one spectator who was not even in the theater. What mattered was not the drama itself but the account of how the confrontation was handled, which had to be designed to satisfy Stalin. Molotov played along. That same day he sent Stalin his own telegram: “Your coded telegram was filled with deep mistrust toward me as a Bolshevik and a man, which I take as the most serious party warning for all my work going forward, wherever that might be. I will try through my deeds to earn your trust, in which every honest Bolshevik sees not simply personal trust, but the trust of the party, which is dearer to me than my life.”³⁶ Judging by the correspondence that followed, Stalin felt that he had achieved the desired effect. He clearly knew that Molotov’s “crimes” had no significance, and his underling had never disobeyed any direct instruction. Molotov had simply used his own discretion on occasions when Stalin’s long-distance guidance was intermittent and vague.

The Molotov scandal was dropped quickly because its true purpose lay elsewhere: Stalin wanted to make changes to the top leadership. He began this reorganization as soon as he returned to Moscow. On 29 December 1945 he brought his old comrade Andrei Zhdanov into the inner circle. The Five were now Six. In October 1946, Nikolai Voznesensky was also admitted to the group, meaning that the country was now governed by the Seven.³⁷

The return of the “Leningraders”—Zhdanov and Voznesensky—into Stalin’s inner circle provoked competition within the Politburo. Malenkov and Beria, who had pushed the Leningraders aside during the war, were now forced to concede power to them. In May 1946 Stalin removed Malenkov from the post of Central Committee secretary, accusing him of covering up irregularities in the aviation industry, which had been his portfolio during the war. Malenkov’s responsibilities overseeing the Central Committee apparat were handed over to Zhdanov. Around the same time, a blow was struck against Beria. Stalin forced Beria’s protégé, Minister for State Security Vsevolod Merkulov, to resign his post in disgrace.³⁸ A dangerous development was that Stalin appointed the former head of military counterintelligence, Viktor Abakumov, with whom Beria did not get along, to take Merkulov’s place.³⁹ According to the rules of Stalinist shake-ups, the new minister was expected to uncover misconduct or—better yet—crimes by his predecessor. Abakumov was well suited to this role. Both Merkulov and Beria were clearly in danger. As Merkulov attested after Stalin’s death, “The story of my departure from the Ministry of State Security gave Beria a number of unpleasant moments. Beria himself told me that because of me he was in trouble with Comrade Stalin.”⁴⁰

Beria’s and Malenkov’s ordeals were relatively painless. Both remained within the top leadership. Presumably they were just being shown who was boss and reminded that they were dispensable. Stalin clearly had no intention of dismantling the system of supreme power that had taken shape. He just wanted to create new counterpoises, new centers of competition.

Stalin was just as calculating in dealing with the military leadership. By the war’s end, the status of the Soviet Union’s marshals and generals was understandably sky-high. For Stalin, who cherished his own reputation as a commander, their popularity was politically undesirable: the victory could be the work of only one genius. Stalin was also concerned about possible conspiracies. The generals, intoxicated by thoughts of their own brilliance, made matters worse. State security, which was always in competition with the military, reported to Stalin on conversations at celebratory dinners where generals lavished one another with praise and made disparaging comments about their vozhd. Stalin’s natural response was repression. Inevitably his first target was Zhukov, the most famous and influential of the wartime military leaders. Zhukov’s life now hung by a thread. Stalin ordered the arrest of a number of generals close to Zhukov and had a case opened against Zhukov himself. A month later, after Malenkov’s demotion and Merkulov’s firing, Zhukov and other military leaders received a dressing down. A 9 June 1946 order, issued by the minister for the armed forces of the USSR and signed by Stalin, described the wartime commander’s transgressions as follows: “Marshal Zhukov, having lost all modesty and carried away by a sense of personal ambition, felt that his services had not been sufficiently valued and took credit in conversations with subordinates for designing and carrying out all of the Great Patriotic War’s major operations, including those operations with which he had nothing to do.”⁴¹ This condemnation was obviously motivated by Stalin’s jealousy and anger at a lack of proper deference from this national hero and other military leaders and his desire to cut them down to size. But he was not prepared to go so far as to physically annihilate Zhukov, who was too symbolic a figure and too closely associated with him. Public discrediting and demotion would suffice. The order relegated Zhukov to a secondary post commanding a military district. Given the fate of some of Stalin’s other close associates over the years, such a command might even be considered a reward. Zhukov had lost a great deal but not everything. Toward the end of his life, Stalin agreed to readmit Zhukov to the Central Committee, a sign that he was finally back in the vozhd’s good graces.

By late 1946 these reshufflings had evened out the balance of power among Stalin’s associates. The firings, demotions, and public humiliations more or less restored the structure of top government that had existed before the war. Stalin could now leave his associates in relative peace as he dealt with the country’s pressing economic problems.

 CURRENCY REFORM AS A REFLECTION OF THE SYSTEM

Militarization, physical devastation, famine, an inefficient ration system, crippled agriculture, a degraded social infrastructure, and a reliance on compulsion in mobilizing the labor force—such were the features of the postwar Soviet economy. War’s toll was, of course, reflected in the sorry state of the budget. The government had financed the war’s huge costs primarily by printing money. The predictable result was spiraling inflation. Something had to be done about the excess currency circulating through the economy. To reduce the amount of money in circulation, the Soviet leadership ordered new rubles printed and old rubles devalued.

In his memoirs, the wartime finance commissar, Arseny Zverev, states that by late 1943 he had already discussed such measures with Stalin.⁴² Evidence that the finance commissariat was planning for currency reform so early can also be found in the archives. Toward the end of 1943 it was decided that the reform would be introduced after the war by reducing the buying power of the ruble through increased prices, exchanging old rubles for new ones, and abolishing the ration system.⁴³ This is largely the program that went into effect a few years later.

Now that the war was over, the problem of stabilizing the country’s finances and doing away with rationing took on tremendous political importance. Doing away with ration cards even more quickly than in capitalist countries would demonstrate the advantages of socialism. The reform measures were planned for 1946, but the famine forced a delay. Throughout that year, Finance Commissar Zverev sent Stalin several memoranda on the upcoming reforms. Judging by Stalin’s notations on these documents, he took a great interest in the topic.⁴⁴ As preparations reached their final phase, Zverev had frequent face-to-face meetings with the vozhd. According to the log of visitors to Stalin’s office, during the period leading up to the reform’s introduction on 14 December 1947, Zverev was there thirteen times.⁴⁵

Finally, on 13 December 1947, the Politburo voted to approve the main documents instituting the currency reform and abolishing ration cards. It was stipulated that the measures would be announced over the radio at six o’clock in the evening on 14 December and in newspapers the following day. Overnight, between 14 and 15 December, the population was deprived of a significant portion of its savings. For every ten rubles people had in their possession, they would now receive one. There was a more complex system to deal with bank deposits. Accounts with under three thousand rubles were not affected, but those with three to ten thousand rubles would be compensated at a rate of two new rubles for every three old ones. Deposits over ten thousand rubles were compensated at a rate of one to two.

The Politburo was fully aware that the reform would not be popular. A large part of its resolution, which was intended for publication, was devoted to a detailed explanation of the move’s necessity, utility, and fairness. Keenly in tune with widespread prejudices, the text asserted that the reform would hit hardest at “speculative elements who have amassed large stores of money.” This assertion was false: the most well-off Soviet citizens were in the best position to convert their cash into other forms of wealth. Nevertheless, the idea that the currency reform was a means of confiscating ill-gotten gains proved extremely popular. As usual, the resolution did not neglect to mention the financial hardships faced by the toiling masses in capitalist countries. Its wording suggests that Stalin played an active role in drafting it. Among the revisions made in his handwriting is the added promise that this would be the Soviet people’s “final sacrifice.”⁴⁶

Major reforms are always fraught with difficulty. The new rubles began to be printed in 1946 for introduction at the end of 1947, but at first a high percentage proved defective. To maintain secrecy, the new money was not delivered to Gosbank branches, of which there were many, but to specially set up storage facilities evenly distributed around the country. The new rubles were transported in special, heavily guarded train cars. Finally, when it came time to exchange rubles, in addition to regular Gosbank branches, 46,000 exchange points were set up, for which 170,000 workers were hired.⁴⁷

No amount of secrecy, of course, could hide such a major operation from public view. Rumors began to spread and became more persistent after salaries and pensions for the second half of November were paid ahead of schedule. Overall, however, the public did not know what the reform would look like. Spurred by contradictory rumors, people scrambled to save their nest eggs. At first the panic affected purchases of durable goods and valuables. On 29 November 1947, Internal Affairs Minister Sergei Kruglov reported to Stalin that customers were flooding stores to buy manufactured goods and crowding into banks to withdraw their savings. Store shelves were emptied, and even items for which there had previously been no demand disappeared. Stores sold out of furniture suites going for tens of thousands of rubles—huge sums, given that the average annual salary for laborers or office workers was approximately 7,000 rubles. One suite costing 101,000 rubles that had languished on the showroom floor for years now had four competing buyers. Customers bought furs, fabrics, watches, jewelry, pianos, and rugs.⁴⁸ On 30 November Kruglov reported that hundreds of people had lined up outside Moscow’s department stores before opening. People from neighboring oblasts flooded into the city. Huge lines of up to five hundred people formed outside savings banks. After two days of this buying frenzy, the authorities decided to take action. Kruglov informed Stalin that most stores had been closed under the pretext of renovation or taking inventory. The stores that remained open removed valuable items such as gold jewelry from sale. And some were forced to shut their doors because they had nothing left to sell.⁴⁹

Kruglov’s report of 2 December was not much different. Now that consumer goods were in short supply, people had started to buy up whatever they could find, including musical instruments and phonographs. One store that had been selling six pianos a year sold all eleven it had in stock over two days—30 November and 1 December. The shortage of manufactured goods led to a run on non-perishable food items such as smoked sausage, canned goods, candies, tea, and sugar. This hoarding prompted an order to remove these items from sale. Restaurants did a brisk business, and “drunken individuals would take wads of cash out of their pockets and cry: ‘Look at all this paper.’” Other regions reported similar spending sprees.⁵⁰ If Stalin read such reports—and there is every reason to believe he did—he was given an eye-opening lesson on the lives and economic logic of ordinary Soviet citizens.

It is interesting that the authorities refrained from heavy-handed measures to halt the frenzy. Beginning in early December there was a noticeable increase in small savings bank deposits, an obvious effort to spread savings over multiple small accounts that would counteract the reform’s intention of removing rubles from circulation.⁵¹ Even then, no steps were taken. Stalin could see how unpopular the reform was and did not want to further inflame sentiment against it.

By 15 December it was all over, and the straightforward operation of exchanging old rubles for new and revaluing deposits began. During the eight-day period from 16 to 23 December 1947, Stalin received visitors in his office five times. Each time, Zverev was among them. His visits on 16 and 17 December—the reform’s first days—both lasted two hours. Each time, a significant fraction of the Politburo was also present.⁵² On 3 January 1948 Zverev sent Stalin a report on the reform’s results. It was filled with statistics that must have been encouraging to the government but disheartening to the rest of the population. Before the reform, on 1 December 1947, there were 59 billion rubles in circulation. As a result of the spending spree and ruble exchange, there were now only 4 billion. Deposits in savings accounts had been reduced from 18.6 billion old rubles to 15 billion new ones.⁵³ The percentage by which prices decreased following the abolition of ration cards was modest in comparison with the number of rubles that had been taken out of people’s pockets. The price of bread went down by 20 percent and meat by only 12 percent. Some prices even increased. Woolen fabrics, for example, went up by 27 percent, while clothing in general rose by 11 percent. Overall, the index of state retail prices after the reform went down to 83 percent of what it had been beforehand.⁵⁴ Having exchanged ten old rubles for one new one, a consumer’s purchasing power was now reduced by a factor of eight. The lion’s share of the population’s savings had been confiscated.

To some extent the “shop window effect” that followed—the presence of more goods in stores, even if few could afford them—should have softened the blow. But in Stalin’s USSR, the shop windows were still not very impressive. Poor output in both the agricultural and consumer goods sectors and the general sluggishness of the state-run economy meant that even relatively weak post-reform demand could not be satisfied. As usual, special measures were taken only in major urban centers, Moscow and Leningrad first and foremost. Generous supplies of food and manufactured goods had been warehoused there in advance. But even in these cities, there were limits placed on purchases: bread—two kilograms per customer; meat and meat products—one kilogram; sausage—half a kilogram; milk—one liter; footwear—one pair; socks—two pairs; soap—one bar; matches—two boxes, etc.⁵⁵ In the capitals and in some other major cities, the end of rationing led to supply problems. A few weeks later, Moscow began to receive complaints about empty store shelves, limits on purchases despite the supposed end of rationing, and special shops set up for officials only. One letter from Belgorod read: “Today is the sixth day in a row that my wife stood in line for bread from 2 in the morning to 10, but, alas, all six days she came home without bread.” Facing long lines, high prices, and empty stores, people looked back on the days of ration cards with nostalgia.⁵⁶

Not all population segments suffered equally. People in major cities, especially those receiving high salaries or otherwise affluent, were not greatly affected by the reform. Before the devaluation it had been relatively simple for them to convert their old rubles into goods. After the reform they took advantage of the relative availability of goods and the drop in prices in urban rynoks (food markets where peasants could charge a market price for the goods produced on their private plots). But the price drop hit the peasants hard. Deprived of their savings, uncompensated for their labor on kolkhozes, and forced to carry a heavy tax burden, they were desperate for cash. The reduction in state prices, however modest, pushed down food prices in the rynoks, further depressing their income. Once again, the country’s rural majority was the main victim of Stalin’s policies.

Although the government promoted the reform as a tool in combating the illegitimate acquisition of wealth, in fact it had the opposite effect. Corrupt officials and those operating in the shadow economy managed to convert their cash into luxury goods, which they resold at a profit after the devaluation. In Moscow’s Tushino District, for example, two store directors (both members of the Communist Party) embarked on a large-scale money-making scheme. Using their own money, they bought up suits, fabrics, hundreds of pairs of shoes, and other items. These goods were stashed away until after the reform, when they were gradually sold at rynoks through a network of sellers, as well as through the directors’ stores. The following figures give an idea of how typical such operations were: during the last two weeks of December 1947, approximately 3,000 people working in the retail sector were arrested, of whom 1,100 were store directors and approximately 900 were party members. Such arrests continued at the same rate through January and February.⁵⁷ And this was only the tip of the iceberg.

Another common practice spurred by the devaluation was the backdating of savings account deposits made after the terms of the reform were announced. Many large accounts were broken into smaller ones under the three-thousand-ruble limit. The true scale of such malfeasance is unknown, but records show that this subterfuge was practiced in all regions of the country by a significant proportion of officials. According to incomplete data for March 1948, in just twenty-six oblasts, krais, and republics, more than two thousand officials, including senior party and law enforcement officials, were prosecuted for violating the currency reform law.⁵⁸ Party secretaries and the heads of state security and internal affairs branches were found guilty of such operations. Cases were also uncovered where top regional officials tried to subvert justice. Central Committee records show multiple cases where “certain regional party bodies have dragged out investigations of cases associated with violating the currency law, and in some cases they have even taken under their protection ‘major’ party and government officials, shifting the full burden of guilt on secondary individuals.”⁵⁹ Another case file stated that “a significant proportion of senior party and government officials have essentially escaped punishment.”⁶⁰

Researchers have yet to find evidence of Stalin’s reaction to this malfeasance. The absence of major shake-ups in the wake of the monetary reforms suggests that he maintained a fairly condescending attitude toward this blatant corruption. This stance was nothing new. Stalin consistently demonstrated tolerance for the moral failings of his faithful underlings. He cared about political loyalty and administrative competence.

While the currency reform cast a spotlight on many of the Stalinist system’s flaws, it also had a positive impact on the country’s economic development. Ambitious reconstruction plans for 1948 were surpassed. Having taken so much money out of people’s pockets, the government could print more without risking inflation, a move that was a great help in making up budgetary shortfalls. The relative financial stability achieved in early 1949 enabled wholesale pricing reform in heavy industry, which in turn created the preconditions for industrial development. Economic indicators for 1948 suggested that the most damaging consequences of the war had been overcome and that the main objectives of postwar recovery had been met. The end of the devastating famine of 1946–1947 was especially important. In 1948 the gross grain yield came close to prewar levels, and the production of potatoes (a staple of the Soviet diet) broke all prewar records. In the words of Donald Filtzer, the Soviet Union had entered a period of “attenuated recovery.” Nevertheless, Stalin-style industrialization was able to meet only the most basic needs of the population.⁶¹

 CONSOLIDATING THE SOVIET SPACE

While this economic recovery was under way in the USSR, neighboring countries were still roiled by political instability. In early 1948 the liberal democratic government of Czechoslovakia was overthrown in a coup, making Czechoslovakia the last East European country to join the Communist bloc. Establishing Communist control of these countries was, however, just the first step. They had to adopt the Stalinist model of internal development, pledge to be loyal satellites of the USSR, and unquestioningly submit to Stalin as the supreme leader of the bloc. A number of obstacles stood in the way. Despite repression, the presence of the Red Army, the suppression of educated segments of society, and the expansion of state control of the economy, for some time the newly Communist countries retained a degree of socioeconomic, cultural, and political diversity. Furthermore, the majority of East Europeans opposed the Communists, and power struggles within the Communist parties prevented the emergence of the kinds of dictatorial leaders needed to implement Stalinist socialism. Worse, a number of East European leaders showed signs of unacceptable “liberalism,” preferring a more flexible model of socialism over the Soviet model.⁶²

One “bad example” for any wavering Communists was Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito. In the spring of 1948 he became embroiled in a conflict with the Soviet Union that quickly escalated. Stalin was confronted with a worthy adversary. Tito was a born dictator who, unlike some other Communist leaders, had not simply been placed in power by Moscow but had earned it fighting the Nazis. His hand was further strengthened by the absence of Soviet troops in Yugoslavia. Tito pretended to political independence and aspired to be a leader of the Communist bloc, and he translated these pretensions into actions. In short, he ignored one of the key principles of Stalinization: total submission to Moscow.

Stalin’s hope that severe public accusations would drive a wedge through the Yugoslav leadership and spark mutiny against Tito was disappointed. Tito made quick work of the Kremlin’s Yugoslav clients and emerged from the showdown stronger. This defeat was a painful blow for Stalin. For the first time since the struggle with Trotsky, he was being opposed by a major leader within the Communist movement. And unlike Trotsky, Tito had real power and forces capable of protecting him from the ice picks of Stalin’s professional killers. Tito’s insubordination was not simply a blow to Stalin’s self-respect, but also a dangerous precedent and a crack in the monolithic Soviet bloc. Others might follow Tito’s lead.

The dangers of Titoism intensified confrontations with the West. The first serious standoff in Germany between the USSR and its former allies also came in 1948. The Soviet blockade of the Western sectors of Berlin was met with determined resistance. The system used to supply the Western zone by air—the Berlin Airlift—not only demonstrated the effectiveness of the Western bloc, but also promoted its consolidation. In April 1949 the agreement that established NATO was signed. The following month Stalin was forced to lift the blockade, and that autumn, Germany was formally divided into two separate states.

These foreign policy setbacks ignited Stalin’s suspicions and insecurity and strengthened his resolve to force Stalinization in the East European Communist bloc. Moscow intensified its interference in the internal affairs of its satellites, and demands for accelerated sovietization became more implacable and impatient. Using his familiar methods of purges and fabricated political charges, Stalin initiated and oversaw a campaign against “enemies” within the leaderships of the socialist countries. In late 1948 he succeeded in getting rid of Poland’s unyielding leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka. In Hungary, advisers from Moscow helped orchestrate a case alleging a far-reaching espionage organization, supposedly led by the country’s former minister for internal affairs, Laszlo Rajk. In September 1949 Rajk was convicted and given the death sentence. In December, after a lengthy process of fabricated charges (again with the help of Soviet security advisers), the former secretary of the Bulgarian central committee, Traicho Kostov, was put to death. Stalin kept a close watch over all these cases and sanctioned both the falsification of evidence and the death sentences. Rajk’s and Kostov’s trials prompted arrests in other Communist countries.⁶³ These tactics brought about a concentration of power in the hands of dictators entirely dependent on Stalin and ready to implement any policy he liked.

While overseeing the Stalinization of the Communist bloc, the Soviet dictator still found time to consolidate his power at home—or rather to preempt any possibility that it could be undermined. Setting an example for his satellites, Stalin launched yet another wave of domestic purges. The themes and victims depended to some extent on random developments. One such development was the death of Stalin’s close comrade Andrei Zhdanov in August 1948. Zhdanov’s duties as Stalin’s deputy for party affairs and as head of the Central Committee apparat were taken over by Georgy Malenkov, a shift that upset the balance of power within Stalin’s inner circle. Having lost their patron, the Leningrad group, most prominently represented by Gosplan chairman Voznesensky and Central Committee secretary Kuznetsov, found itself weakened, and the group’s rivals, Beria and Malenkov, were now stronger. Such shifts prompted a new bout of behind-the-scenes struggle. The combination of these intrigues, international tensions, and Stalin’s political calculations spawned the Leningrad Affair, the last purge to roil the upper echelons of power in the USSR. Before it was over blood had been spilled.⁶⁴

Through the efforts of Malenkov and Beria, who probably did not expect their actions to be as damaging as they proved to be, Stalin received compromising materials against the Leningraders. The infractions these materials exposed were relatively minor. In one instance a decision was made to hold a major trade fair in Leningrad without consulting all of the proper authorities. In another, Voznesensky’s agency, Gosplan, made certain errors in putting together plans and misplaced some documents—common occurrences in the highly bureaucratic Soviet system. There were also several instances when regional leaders, mostly Leningraders, attempted to use Voznesensky and Kuznetsov for patronage, but such attempts too were nothing out of the ordinary. They were all the sort of typical rule-bending that Stalin could simply ignore or use as ammunition. He chose to do the latter.

During a Politburo meeting presided over by Stalin in February 1949, Kuznetsov, Voznesensky, and other functionaries close to them were charged with attempting to turn the Leningrad party organization into their own fiefdom. Particularly ominous was a resolution comparing their actions to those of Zinoviev in the 1920s, “when he attempted to turn the Leningrad organization into a power base for his anti-Leninist faction.”⁶⁵ In the months that followed, charges against the beleaguered Leningraders snowballed. They were accused of enemy activity and even espionage. In September 1950, after months of interrogations and torture, Voznesensky, Kuznetsov, and a number of other leaders were sentenced to death in a closed Leningrad courtroom. Several hundred others were given death sentences, imprisoned, or exiled. The purge also affected other regions of the country, where natives of Leningrad held senior posts or had sought support from highly placed Leningraders in Moscow.

The way the Leningrad Affair unfolded suggests that Stalin was using it to pursue multiple goals. It may have been part of his ongoing pattern of intimidation to consolidate power. The accusations of patronage and the large-scale dismantling of networks of officials who made their careers in Leningrad were typical of the preemptive strikes Stalin liked to launch against informal networks within the nomenklatura.⁶⁶ He may also have viewed the Leningrad Affair as part of a larger shake-up at the upper echelons. In any event, the fabrication of evidence against the Leningraders at first unfolded in synchrony with Stalin’s attacks against his old comrades Molotov and Mikoyan. These assaults seem all the more likely to be connected as Molotov had maintained close professional ties with Voznesensky and was on friendly terms with him. Furthermore, while the Leningrad Affair was in full swing, Mikoyan’s son was preparing to marry Kuznetsov’s daughter and, rather surprisingly, proceeded with this plan.

Whatever the reasons for Stalin’s displeasure, Molotov and Mikoyan were its most natural targets. They were his oldest and most distinguished comrades, symbols of the collective leadership that might have been, and the presumptive heirs of the aging vozhd. The task of bolstering his personal power—Stalin’s prime obsession—required him, he felt, to periodically discredit his most influential associates in order to weaken their influence.

For several years the actions Stalin took against Molotov in late 1945 were known only within the narrow circle of the Politburo. Molotov continued to perform key governmental functions: he chaired a number of Council of Ministers commissions, headed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and had a voice on a wide array of questions. This status began to change in 1948. On various pretexts, Stalin used reprimands and limitations on his authority to diminish Molotov’s standing. The main means of pressure was the fabrication of evidence against Molotov’s ethnically Jewish wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, showing her to be involved with “anti-Soviet” Jewish organizations. Stalin demanded that Molotov divorce her. “Stalin,” Molotov later recalled, “came up to me at the Central Committee: ‘You have to divorce your wife!’ And she said to me, ‘If it’s necessary for the party, then we’ll get divorced.’ In late 1948 we divorced.”⁶⁷

On 29 December 1948, “evidence” compiled by state security in the Zhemchuzhina case was brought before the Politburo. She was expelled from the party, a move that meant that arrest was imminent. Molotov abstained from voting, an action that put him in direct conflict with Stalin.⁶⁸ On 20 January 1949 Molotov sent the vozhd a formulaic expression of remorse:

During Central Committee voting on a proposal to expel P. S. Zhemchuzhina from the party I abstained, which I admit to be politically mistaken. I hereby state that having thought over this question, I vote in favor of the Central Committee decision, which corresponds to the interests of the party and the state and teaches a correct understanding of the meaning of Communist Party membership. Furthermore, I admit my grievous guilt in that I did not duly restrain Zhemchuzhina, someone close to me, from false steps and ties with anti-Soviet Jewish nationalists, such as Mikhoels.⁶⁹

In March 1949, Molotov was dismissed from the post of foreign minister, and Mikoyan was relieved of his duties as minister for foreign trade. These dismissals did not mean that the two men were cast out of the government. Both remained members of the Politburo and deputy chairmen of the government, and in these capacities they fulfilled important administrative functions. But their political authority was damaged, an outcome that undoubtedly was Stalin’s true objective.

The use of Zhemchuzhina’s origins in formulating the charges against her reflected a policy of state anti-Semitism that Stalin launched as confrontation with the West intensified. In early 1948 he ordered state security to destroy the prominent Jewish intellectual and theatrical director Solomon Mikhoels. Later that year he ordered the dissolution of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which had been founded during the war to mobilize international support for the USSR. The authorities had begun to view the committee as a nest of spies with ties to foreign intelligence agencies. Over the next few years, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee Affair gradually engulfed more victims, until it ended with a closed trial held from May through July 1952. All the defendants but one were shot.⁷⁰ In 1949, the arrests of Jewish public figures were supplemented with a wide-ranging campaign against “cosmopolitanism.” Many Soviet Jews were arrested, fired from their jobs, and made targets of discrimination and contempt.

Newly available documents confirm what most historians have long believed: such campaigns could not have been conducted without Stalin’s support and involvement. This fact raises legitimate questions about the motives behind Stalin’s anti-Semitism. It is tempting to assume that in the final years of Stalin’s life he merely became more open about a Judophobia he had always held as a predictable aspect of his general misanthropy. The evidence, however, suggests that his postwar anti-Semitism was primarily a product of domestic and foreign policy calculations. A complex set of historical factors lay behind his turn toward anti-Semitism as a political tool.

Foremost among these factors was the evident growth in anti-Semitism in the USSR. In no small part because of Nazi propaganda, anti-Semitic feelings and beliefs had spread among certain segments of Soviet society. During the war, even highly placed Soviet functionaries did not hesitate to lace their reports with anti-Semitic comments. In January 1944 the deputy commander of Soviet air forces, General Grigory Vorozheikin, wrote to Stalin and other Soviet leaders about the problem of having too many members of the military working in comfortable jobs at headquarters or in commissaries. Regarding those manning the commissaries that sold items to the troops—voentorgs—he wrote, “At the fronts they’re called not ‘voentorgs’ but ‘abramtorgs.’ … All of these ‘abramtorgs’ should be sent to fight.”⁷¹ Among the letters Stalin placed in his personal archive during the postwar years we find some expressing anti-Semitic feelings and others complaining about the spread of anti-Semitism. One writer, who accused Jews of shirking physical labor, offered a proposal on how to “reeducate” them: “Separating Jews, as a worthy nation, into a separate republic … and making them work on a justly organized basis would be widely approved by all the other peoples of the Soviet Union.”⁷² Stalin undoubtedly was aware of the prevalence of such feelings and took them into consideration.

Like any totalitarian regime, the Stalinist dictatorship needed to keep society mobilized. This goal was achieved both by provoking anxiety about external threats and by using domestic groups as scapegoats, thereby channeling dissatisfaction away from the country’s leaders. The spread of anti-Semitism shows that Jews were the most convenient target for social stigmatization. In the immediate aftermath of the war, however, Stalin was not able to exploit popular anti-Semitism. The complicated games being played in the international arena and the fact that there were advantages still to be derived from his alliance with the West forced him to be circumspect. The ideological campaigns of the first postwar years, designed to combat the rather amorphous idea of “kowtowing to the West,” were intended as “ideological education” for the intelligentsia and probably had little resonance among the general population.

The situation changed as tensions spiked with the West, as embodied by the United States with its strong Jewish community. As relations with the new Jewish state of Israel broke down and Israel became allied with the United States, Soviet Jews became more suitable targets. As Yuri Slezkine put it, “The Jews as a Soviet nationality were now an ethnic diaspora potentially loyal to a hostile foreign state.”⁷³ The new ideological paradigm that took shape in 1948–1949 brought Stalin’s campaign against kowtowing into line with his exploitation of anti-Semitism. The two coalesced in the campaign against “cosmopolitans,” appropriately understood by the Soviet masses as targeting Soviet Jews and their foreign patrons. A 1949 letter selected to be shown to Stalin captures the essence of this campaign: “Just as the entire German people bear responsibility for Hitler’s aggression, so too the Jewish people must bear responsibility for the actions of the bourgeois cosmopolitans.”⁷⁴ State anti-Semitism was transformed into a tool of social manipulation.

Stalin’s personal prejudice undoubtedly played an important role in this new twist in the political line. There are many signs that during the final years of his life, he viewed Jews as a “counterrevolutionary” nation, much as he had viewed Poles, Germans, and the peoples of the North Caucasus before and during the war. The repression of the 1930s, the Stalinist regime’s failure to protect its citizens from the Holocaust, and postwar anti-Semitism had all dampened the revolutionary fervor many Soviet Jews felt during and after the revolution. Now, Stalin assumed, Jews had turned their gaze westward, toward the United States, and were prepared to serve the West with the enthusiasm they had once shown for the revolution. “Any Jew-nationalist is an agent of American intelligence,” Stalin told a meeting of the party’s top leadership in late 1952. “Jew-nationalists believe that their nation was saved by the U.S.A. (there you can become rich, a bourgeois, etc.). They feel they have an obligation to the Americans.”⁷⁵ These suspicions were only intensified by the Jewish wives of some of his closest associates and by his own daughter’s Jewish husband. Stalin’s political anti-Semitism, taking deep root during his final years, became a key factor in both domestic and foreign policy.

 MEETING WITH MAO

The setbacks Stalin faced in Europe were partly compensated by the advance of communism in Asia. On 1 October 1949, a Communist victory in the protracted Chinese civil war resulted in the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under the leadership of Mao Zedong. The Soviet leadership immediately established diplomatic relations with the new government and severed all ties with the defeated Kuomintang.

The Communist victory in China no doubt strengthened the Soviet Union’s position in the Cold War, but it brought with it a new set of problems associated with the building of Sino-Soviet relations. Despite its dependence on the USSR, Communist China was too imposing a force to remain just another satellite. Stalin had reason to suspect that Mao might confront him with the same assertive intractability he had encountered in Yugoslavia. Considering China’s size and its importance within the Third World, such recalcitrance could have much more serious consequences. A major source of friction was economic problems. The need to provide aid to a war-torn friendly power was a heavy burden for the financially strained Soviet Union.

Even before the Chinese Communists had come to power, Stalin had retained personal control over contacts with them. Through Soviet military intelligence he had set up radio communication with Mao, whose army was based in northeastern China. This line of communication was maintained through special Soviet emissaries, who also served as Mao’s physicians. Although Mao and Stalin kept up a continuous written correspondence, this was not enough for the Chinese revolutionary leader, who repeatedly expressed a desire to visit the Soviet Union. Probably he saw such a visit in symbolic as well as practical terms: he needed to confirm his status as the leader of the Chinese people and a partner (albeit junior) of Stalin. But Stalin kept finding ways to forestall a visit. At first he felt it inadvisable to demonstrate close ties with the Chinese Communists when they were not the country’s official government. The situation in China was extremely fluid, and a Communist victory seemed far from certain.

After several postponements by Moscow, Mao began to lose patience. On 4 July 1948 he informed Stalin that he intended to set out for Harbin and fly from there to Moscow. Ten days later he received the following response: “In view of the commenced grain harvest work, the leading comrades will leave for the provinces in August, where they will remain until November. Therefore the party’s Central Committee is asking Com. Mao Zedong to time his visit to Moscow for the end of November so as to have an opportunity to see all the leading comrades.”⁷⁶ Mao had no choice but to comply, but he made his annoyance plain. Stalin’s excuse sounded ridiculous, and the Chinese leader did not try to pretend otherwise. The Soviet communications officer attached to Mao even felt compelled to inform Stalin of Mao’s reaction:

I have known Mao Zedong for more than 6 years and could tell that his smile and the words “hao, hao—good, good,” spoken as he was listening to the translation, did not mean that he was happy with the telegram. … He was sure that he would be going immediately. Probably the trip became necessary for him. He waited for a reply with great eagerness.… Mao Zedong’s suitcases were being packed, and even leather shoes were bought (like everybody here, he wears cloth slippers), and a thick wool coat was tailored.… So now he is outwardly calm, polite and attentive, courteous in a purely Chinese manner. But it is hard to see his true soul.

This visit was becoming a serious headache. From August through December 1948, as the Communists achieved a string of decisive victories, Mao continued to insist on coming. In a telegram dated 28 September 1948 he wrote, “On a series of questions it is necessary to report personally to the Central Committee and to the glavny khoziain [the boss or chief].” In early January 1949 he again expressed his desire to come to Moscow to report to the “glavny khoziain.” Stalin stood firm. In January 1949 the Soviet side again canceled a scheduled visit. Anastas Mikoyan was sent to the Chinese instead. As Mikoyan later recalled, in discussing this matter Stalin had justified the refusal to receive Mao by saying that it would “be interpreted in the West as a visit to Moscow to receive instructions.… This would lead to a loss of prestige for the Chinese Communist Party and would be used by the imperialists and the Chiang Kai-shek clique against the Chinese Communists.”⁷⁷ This explanation fit nicely with Stalin’s policy of caution and demonstrative neutrality.

During Mikoyan’s visit in February 1949, the Communist march to victory entered a decisive phase. Negotiations were begun on the terms of military and economic assistance from the USSR and what to do about treaties between the Soviets and the Kuomintang. A friendship and cooperation treaty, along with associated accords, had been signed with the Chiang Kai-shek government in August 1945. These documents stemmed from agreements reached with the Allies in Yalta: in exchange for Stalin’s promise to enter the war against Japan, the United States and Britain had agreed to give to the USSR lands that the Russian Empire had lost in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. The Kuomintang government had recognized the independence of the Outer Mongolian Soviet satellite, the People’s Republic of Mongolia; the Soviet Union’s rights to build a military base in Port Arthur; and its long-term lease of the port of Dalny. The Chinese-Changchun Railway, which connected Port Arthur and Dalny with the USSR proper, had been brought under Soviet administration. There was lingering dissatisfaction over these forced concessions in China. With time, the Soviet presence inside the country began to look increasingly like a politically dangerous anachronism. Both Moscow and the Chinese Communist leadership understood this. Mutual concessions were expected; it was only a question of degree.

After the Chinese Communists finally achieved victory, Stalin no longer had grounds to avoid Mao’s visit. Furthermore, given the new situation, a face-to-face meeting would be extremely helpful in resolving key questions regarding the Sino-Soviet relationship. Mao left Beijing on 6 December 1949. After a ten-day trip he arrived at Moscow’s Yaroslavl Station on 16 December, exactly at noon. Mao’s interpreter recalled that the station clock struck twelve just as they pulled up, making the arrival all the more dramatic.⁷⁸ A famous photograph capturing the meeting on the station platform shows the head of the honor guard in the front row with his saber drawn, Bulganin in his marshal’s uniform, Molotov, and Mao. The Chinese Communist leader, tall and stout next to the slight Molotov and Bulganin, looked imposing in his large fur collar and high fur hat. Later that evening Stalin received Mao in his Kremlin office.

Did the Soviet and Chinese leaders like each other? They certainly had much in common. Both were born in remote provinces to families that were poor but not destitute. Both despised their fathers and loved their mothers. Despite material deprivations, each had obtained an education, joined the revolutionary underground in his youth, and overcome his modest social origins. Each had received much of his education through independent, unguided reading and showed a penchant for abstract, philosophical topics and radical ideas. Both wrote verse and enjoyed literature idealizing rebels and brigands with forceful personalities, physical strength, and indomitable will. Neither had a talent for languages, knew a single foreign language, or even spoke his dominant language very well. Stalin’s accent was strongly Georgian, Mao’s Xiang (Hunanese).⁷⁹ Both were ruthless and decisive. Mao fully shared Stalin’s views on attaining sole dictatorial powers and governing and largely borrowed the Soviet leader’s methods, carrying out purges, liquidating former comrades, embracing forced rapid industrialization, and presiding over a great famine. The characterization of Mao prepared for the Soviet leadership in 1949 by the doctor and radio communications specialist A. Ya. Orlov describes the Chinese leader as “Unhurried, even slow.… He moves steadily toward any goal he sets, but not always following a straight path, often with detours.… Is a natural performer. Is able to hide his feelings and can play whatever role is needed.”⁸⁰ This description greatly resembled Stalin. In December 1949, when Stalin was celebrating his seventieth birthday, Mao was about to turn fifty-six. Understandably, Mao looked up to Stalin. Among the Chinese leadership, the Soviet leader was referred to as “the old man.”⁸¹

Mao showed his respect for Stalin during the 16 December meeting. He made no demands and did not insist on anything, instead asking for advice and listening to it attentively. Stalin approved of this form of interaction. On hearing Mao’s unwelcome but not unexpected question about the fate of the 1945 Sino-Soviet agreement, he launched into a lengthy explanation. The Soviet side wanted to “formally” preserve the existing agreement, he stressed, but was prepared to make certain changes that would be advantageous to China. Spelling out the political drawbacks of scrapping the agreement altogether, Stalin explained that it had been part of the Yalta agreements with the United States and Great Britain. Annulling it would “give America and England the legal grounds to raise questions about modifying also the treaty’s provisions concerning the Kurile Islands and South Sakhalin.” It is unclear whether Mao immediately understood how spurious this argument was; he certainly grasped it later. In any event, he took an understanding tone, and the conversation moved on to pleasanter subjects. Stalin agreed to requests for aid. The talks ended on a high note. Stalin even paid Mao the compliment of proposing to collect and publish his works in Russian.⁸²

Despite the atmosphere of goodwill and warmth, the meeting must have left Mao with mixed feelings. Of course the Chinese leader was given many promises and generous displays of respect. In the end, however, Stalin had refused to give him an item near the top of his wish list: an accord that would supersede the 1945 agreement. Politically, such an accord was a high priority for Mao. As subsequent events would show, he decided to bide his time.

The following days were a bustle of activity not conducive to the discussion of weighty matters. A number of foreign guests arrived for Stalin’s seventieth birthday. On 21 December a grand celebration was held at the Bolshoi Theater. Mao was seated in the first row of the presidium with Stalin and was the first foreign guest to give a speech. “When Mao Zedong stepped up to the podium,” the Hungarian Communist Party leader Matyas Rakosi later recalled, “an ovation erupted the likes of which the Bolshoi Theater had probably never seen. I could see that this exultation and such a reception had an effect on Mao Zedong.”⁸³

Despite this show of respect, when the fanfare subsided Mao found himself in an unenviable position. Stalin’s refusal to sign a new treaty left a major purpose of his visit unfulfilled. Most historians view the events that unfolded over the rest of his stay in Moscow as a subtle war of nerves. Stalin was clearly showing Mao who was boss. Mao, in response, applied his own form of pressure. After Stalin’s death he claimed to have insisted on his demands, but he was probably exaggerating. In fact, claiming illness (he was indeed in a poor physical state), he demonstratively went into seclusion, refusing to take part in various events on his schedule and announcing that he had decided to return to China a month earlier than planned.⁸⁴ This tactic was to bear fruit.

Scholars have offered a variety of explanations for Stalin’s change of position, but probably he had been prepared to strike a deal from the start. Skilled negotiator that he was, Stalin began the talks with a refusal because he was wary that China’s strongly nationalistic new leaders might make excessive demands. This was an effective ruse. Mao apparently sensed what Stalin was up to and proved himself a worthy sparring partner. After Stalin agreed to continue negotiations, Mao began to drag his feet. Negotiations were to begin after the arrival of a group of Chinese leaders, but Mao instructed them to take their time. At first they delayed their departure from China, and then they chose a slow means of transportation to the Soviet capital—train.

It was not until 22 January 1950 that talks resumed among Stalin, Mao, and Mao’s associates in Stalin’s office. Stalin and Mao both reaffirmed their intention of concluding new agreements and gave instructions on drafting them. After some tough negotiating, on 14 February the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance was signed in the Kremlin by the USSR and the PRC, along with a number of ancillary treaties. The Soviet side lost almost all of the huge advantages it had gained through the Yalta compromises and the 1945 Sino-Soviet treaty. Under the 1945 agreement, the Chinese-Changchun Railway and Port Arthur were given to the Soviet Union for thirty years, but under the 1950 agreement they were to be returned to China by the end of 1952. China was to take back property leased by the USSR in the port of Dalny almost immediately. As a result, the Soviet Union lost its ice-free port on the Pacific and material resources of significant value. Some authors have described these agreements as “generosity unprecedented in international treaties.”⁸⁵ The new Chinese leaders did, however, pay a price. They renounced all claims to Outer Mongolia and also signed a secret protocol banning citizens of third-party countries from being given concessions or conducting business in Manchuria and Xinjiang, thereby allowing the USSR to retain exclusive privileges in these border zones.

It seemed at the time that the USSR, while relinquishing many tactical advantages, was gaining a critical global edge. The country with the planet’s largest population now belonged to the Soviet bloc. China had become the gravitational center and a source of real assistance for the many movements throughout Asia opposing Western influence in the region. The idea that the USSR was surrounded by capitalist countries—an enduring theme of Soviet propaganda—had been turned on its head. One could now talk about socialist encirclement of the Western world.

Immediately after signing the treaties, Stalin again showed his respect for the new Chinese leaders by attending a reception held by the Chinese embassy at the Metropol Hotel that same day, 14 February. According to Stalin’s interpreter, Nikolai Fedorenko, the choice of where to hold the reception was a source of disagreement between Stalin and Mao. The Soviet leader proposed the Kremlin, but Mao preferred, as a matter of prestige, to hold it elsewhere. “The Kremlin,” he explained, “is a place for state receptions by the Soviet government. Our country, a sovereign state, finds this unsuitable.” Stalin responded that he could not attend such a reception: “I never attend receptions at restaurants or foreign embassies. Never.” Mao insisted. After a conspicuous pause, throughout which Mao kept his intent gaze on the Soviet leader, Stalin relented: “Fine, Comrade Mao Zedong, I’ll come if you want me to so much.”⁸⁶ A standard invitation in the name of the Chinese ambassador to the USSR, handwritten, arrived requesting the presence of Generalissimo Stalin and his wife (the invitation of whom may have reflected diplomatic protocol but more likely showed that the Chinese knew nothing about Stalin’s personal life). The attire: dress uniforms with medals.⁸⁷

Stalin’s appearance was the highlight of the reception. He was late, and as Fedorenko describes it, an aura of anticipation hung over the banquet hall as everyone whispered the same question: Would he show up? He was greeted, Fedorenko wrote, “with loud applause and noisy exclamations of delight.” Stalin stopped, paused, and then headed toward Mao. A round of toasts began. “Everyone who spoke, and not only they, kept their eyes on the two figures standing side by side and occasionally engaging one another in conversation.” After lengthy and tiresome toasts and ovations, Stalin made a gesture. Once the room settled into silence, he pronounced a toast to Mao and the success of the People’s Republic of China. All drained their glasses in synchrony. “There was another burst of applause, enthusiastic exclamations, and general rejoicing.”⁸⁸

On 16 February Stalin hosted a farewell luncheon in honor of the Chinese. The following day the delegation set off for Beijing by train. The heyday of “Sino-Soviet friendship” had begun. With the support of the USSR, China repaired its economy and built hundreds of new factories in its most important sectors. The Korean War, which began shortly after Mao Zedong’s visit, strengthened the bond between the two regimes, especially its military component. Beneath the surface, however, was the tension that had already manifested itself during Mao’s visit. Proclamations of common ideological objectives and unity against a common enemy could not hide differences rooted in diverging national interests. The coming to power of the Chinese Communists was just the beginning of a complicated relationship in which both states pretended to the role of leadership of the international Communist movement. The principles Stalin established to guide his relationship with his vast neighbor to the east would work only so long as the Chinese leadership felt dependent on Soviet aid and support. Like much else that Stalin left to his heirs, these principles would not be viable for long.

 THE THREAT OF WORLD WAR III

The Communist victory in China coincided with another important development. In late August 1949, having devoted tremendous resources to developing a nuclear capability, the Soviet Union conducted its first test of an atom bomb.⁸⁹ With the success of this test, the Stalinist system showed that it was ready to do whatever it took to achieve high-priority military objectives. Lavrenty Beria was put in charge of the atom bomb project, a telling choice given his reputation for ruthlessness and decisiveness. He must have known that failure at this high-priority task could have brought his career—even his life—to a sudden end. Later, after Stalin’s death, he recalled that he left for the test site in Kazakhstan “in a dejected mood.”⁹⁰ Soon, however, he was able to breathe a sigh of relief.

Possession of an atom bomb, despite its tremendous significance for the Soviet Union’s stature as a military power, is unlikely to have gone to Stalin’s head. He probably took sober account of both the relatively limited options for using such a weapon and the real balance of power in the world. The Western powers had shown decisiveness in opposing the Soviet bloc and building up their already impressive military potential. Stalin could not rely on force alone. In the realm of foreign policy (much more than domestic policy), he exercised caution and pragmatism. Over several years the situation in Korea, the site of the first “hot” war between the Western and Communist blocs, offered examples of Stalin’s approach.

After the defeat of Japan in 1945, Korea was partitioned along the 38th parallel. North of the parallel, the Japanese surrendered to Soviet troops, and in the south, to the United States. As in Europe, a pro-Soviet government was established in the Soviet-occupied zone and a pro-Western one in the U.S.-occupied zone. The starting point for this process was the installation of puppet regimes by each side. The Americans put in power a seventy-year-old professor named Syngman Rhee, who had spent thirty-three years in exile in the United States, where he received his education. In the North, Moscow installed a thirty-three-year-old Red Army officer, Kim Il Sung.

Several years after the capitulation of Japan, Korea was far from calm. Small military clashes and saber rattling were a part of everyday life. Both sides were coming to the conclusion that the only path to reuniting Korea was through war—a war kept at bay only by the presence of American and Soviet troops. Fearing a direct confrontation, Stalin and the American leaders preferred to tread with caution. Stalin’s approach was summed up in instructions he gave to Soviet representatives in North Korea in May 1947: “We should not meddle too deeply in Korean affairs.”⁹¹ In late 1948 Soviet troops left the country, and the United States began to withdraw its contingent the following summer.

The North Korean leaders saw the American departure as opening the door to military action, but in the fall of 1949 Stalin was still rejecting their insistent requests to sanction an armed offensive against the South. In early 1950, with the victory of Mao Zedong in China and the return home of North Korean units that had fought alongside the Chinese Communists, the situation began to change. Kim Il Sung hoped that the Chinese might offer the Korean Communists reciprocal assistance. He intensified pressure on Moscow, hinting at the possibility of a reorientation toward China.⁹² Stalin was confronted with a convoluted web of arguments for and against war that historians are still trying to sort out today.

The principles of realpolitik that often guided Stalin in the international arena called for caution. Continuing the policy of a divided Korea while strengthening the Communist North as a force to counteract the Americans seemed like the best option. Kim Il Sung’s demands, or rather insistent requests, to reunify the country by force were easy for him to continue to turn down. The China factor aside, the North Korean leaders were still Stalin’s puppets. Only the USSR could give the North Koreans arms and other vital resources needed for the government to survive. The Chinese themselves relied on Soviet assistance.

Tilting the scales in the other direction was the great-power urge for expansion, the natural tendency to fill a void and capture territory that was not clearly spoken for. Many scholars believe that Stalin may have been emboldened by a statement the Americans made in January 1950 about the sphere of the United States’ national interests that included no mention of Korea. It sounded like an admission of American weakness after defeat in China. Optimistic assurances by Kim Il Sung and a wager on a pro-Communist uprising in the South’s rear offered the prospect of a blitzkrieg that would confront the United States with a fait accompli and leave no time for effective intervention. Also heavily weighing the scales on this side were the pretentions of the USSR, and Stalin personally, to the role of leader of the revolutionary movement in the Third World. Finally, Stalin may have wanted to compensate for setbacks in Europe.

Whatever his thinking was, in early 1950 Stalin decided in favor of action and signaled Kim Il Sung that he could begin preparing an invasion. In April Kim came to Moscow to meet with Stalin and discuss the details.⁹³ Together they outlined a plan and timeline for the war, and with the help of the USSR, the North Koreans began urgent preparations. By the time combat began, they had acquired a huge advantage over the South. On 25 June 1950, Kim Il Sung’s troops began their offensive. Like many other attempts at blitzkrieg, this one met with defeat. The rapid response by the United States, which Stalin had worried about but chosen to discount, dramatically changed the situation. The American leadership saw the aggression in Korea as the start of a broad Soviet offensive that would ultimately include Europe.⁹⁴ Having decided to intervene, the Americans quickly outmaneuvered the Soviet bloc diplomatically. A session of the UN Security Council, convened the very day military operations began, condemned the North as the aggressor (Yugoslavia abstained and the Soviet ambassador was absent).⁹⁵ Soon afterward, American troops landed in South Korea and were quickly joined by forces from fifteen other states, a fact that was of greater political than military significance.

Despite some initial successes by the North, this start to the war dampened Kim Il Sung’s confidence. Stalin demanded that the war go on and encouraged the North Koreans with advice and new deliveries of military hardware. “In our opinion the attack absolutely must continue and the sooner South Korea is liberated the less chance there is for intervention,” Stalin wrote the Soviet ambassador in Pyongyang on 1 July 1950.⁹⁶ But the wager on a victorious conclusion to the war before serious American forces could reach the peninsula failed. After capturing almost all of South Korea by September, the North Koreans were not able to fully expel its government. The Americans launched a powerful counterstrike. Under the UN flag, coalition forces advanced rapidly and by the end of October had captured most of North Korea and taken Pyongyang. The time had come for the Soviet side to play its final card: the Chinese “volunteers.”

Now began the confusing and still little-studied negotiations between Stalin and the Chinese leadership. At one point it appeared they had ended in failure. On 13 October Stalin sent the following directive to Kim Il Sung: “We feel that continuing resistance is pointless. The Chinese comrades are refusing to take part militarily. Under these circumstances you must prepare to evacuate completely to China and/or the USSR. It is of the utmost importance to withdraw all troops and military hardware. Draw up a detailed plan of action and follow it rigorously. The potential for fighting the enemy in the future must be preserved.”⁹⁷

The Soviet ambassador urgently met with the North Korean leaders and read them Stalin’s telegram. As the ambassador reported, “Kim Il Sung stated that it was very hard for them [to accept Stalin’s recommendation], but since there is such advice they will fulfill it.”⁹⁸ How serious was Stalin’s directive? Was he truly prepared to lose North Korea? Apparently he was. If the Chinese refused to send troops, Stalin had no other option since he categorically rejected the idea of bringing in Soviet troops. It is also possible, however, that Stalin believed the decision to evacuate forces might lead the Chinese to think twice. The American advance was more threatening to China than to the USSR. Furthermore, having announced his intention to withdraw, Stalin continued to try to engage the Chinese. He made concessions on the question of arms deliveries and offered more specific promises to deploy Soviet air cover. These efforts bore fruit. Mao agreed to enter the war. “The old man writes to us that we must step up,” is how he described Stalin’s demands to his comrades.⁹⁹

Battered by the Chinese, the South Koreans and their allies withdrew from North Korea. In early 1951 they lost Seoul for the second time. Then came a counterstrike from the South. It was beginning to look like neither side could achieve a decisive victory. The Soviet Union tried to stay in the shadows, although Stalin did keep his promise to provide covert air support for Kim Il Sung’s and Mao Zedong’s forces. The main victims of this great-power standoff were the Korean people. Millions of lives were lost, and the Koreans were forced to live as a divided nation. Those in the North endured one of history’s most brutal dictatorships, a regime that largely followed the Stalinist model.

The Korean War heightened international tensions and spurred the arms race. While the development of military industries had always been an unquestioned priority for the Soviet leadership, during the final years of Stalin’s life the buildup moved to a new level. In January 1951 a meeting was held between the Soviet leadership and top officials from the Eastern bloc. Archival documents relating to this meeting remain classified. The only reason historians know it even took place is that it is mentioned in various memoirs. The most detailed description of what happened there is given in the memoirs of Hungarian Communist Party leader Matyas Rakosi. According to his account, the Soviet side was represented by Stalin and several members of the Politburo and military. The East European countries sent their first party secretaries and defense ministers (only the Polish party secretary was absent). Sergei Shtemenko, chief of the General Staff of the armed forces of the USSR, gave a speech about the growing threat from NATO and the need to counterbalance it with a military buildup by the socialist countries. The Soviet leadership assigned the satellite countries the task of greatly increasing the size of their armies within three years and creating a military-industrial foundation to support this enhanced military might. Shtemenko provided specific numerical targets.

Rakosi states that Shtemenko’s numbers provoked debate. He quotes the Polish defense minister, Konstantin Rokossovsky, as saying that the army the Poles were being asked to assemble by 1953 was already being planned but would not be attainable until 1956. Other representatives also questioned their countries’ abilities to manage such a rapid buildup. The Soviets, however, were adamant. Stalin answered Rokossovsky that the timetable set forth by the Poles could remain in place only if Rokossovsky could guarantee no new wars before 1956. Absent such a guarantee, it was better to adopt Shtemenko’s proposal.¹⁰⁰

We do not know what plans were on the drawing board for the Soviet military or to what extent they were realized. There is nevertheless sufficient evidence to conclude that Stalin was aiming for a serious military buildup. According to official figures, the army, which had been reduced to 2.9 million soldiers by 1949, had reached 5.8 million by 1953.¹⁰¹ Investment in the military and naval ministries, as well as production of military arms and hardware, grew by 60 percent in 1951 and 40 percent in 1952. As a comparison, government investment in the non-military sectors of the Soviet economy grew by 6 percent in 1951 and 7 percent in 1952.¹⁰²

Development of nuclear weaponry and delivery systems remained the highest-priority and most expensive military program. In addition to the nuclear project, significant resources were dedicated to rocket technology, jet-propelled aviation, and an air defense system for Moscow.¹⁰³ During the final months of his life, Stalin showed his determination to outpace his rivals in the arms race. In February 1953 he approved major programs in aviation and naval ship construction. The first provided for the creation of 106 bomber divisions by the end of 1955, up from 32 as of 1953. In order to outfit new divisions, the plan was to build 10,300 planes during 1953–1955 and increase the air and naval forces by 290,000 people. The second program allocated huge resources to the construction of heavy and medium cruisers before 1959. Soviet military bases were established in the Far Eastern regions of Kamchatka and Chukotka, close to the maritime boundary with the United States.¹⁰⁴

Did this buildup mean that Stalin was planning to launch a preemptive strike and unleash a new world war? There is no evidence to support this line of speculation. It is important to note that the massive arms buildup programs were planned to take place over several years. Historians of Soviet foreign policy also note Stalin’s caution and pragmatism in the international arena. During the postwar years he behaved toward the West approximately as he had toward Nazi Germany before the war. He preferred behind-the-scenes maneuvering over direct confrontation. This approach had been on display in the Korean War. While encouraging its continuation, Stalin had consistently avoided direct conflict with the Americans. He had intentionally dragged out the signing of an armistice, seeing the war as a way to let others get their hands dirty weakening the United States. In a private conversation with the Chinese leader Zhou Enlai a few months before his death, Stalin frankly and cynically explained: “This war is causing the Americans a lot of headaches. The North Koreans have lost nothing, except for the casualties they took during this war.… You have to have self-control, patience. Of course you have to understand the Koreans—they’ve taken a lot of casualties, but you have to explain to them that this is something big. You have to have patience, you have to have great self-control.”¹⁰⁵

It took Stalin’s death to free the Koreans from the obligation of taking casualties to further another country’s interests. His heirs pursued a policy of relaxing international tensions and reducing the burden of the arms race. By July 1953 a decision was made to conclude a truce in Korea. Stalin’s death brought an end to the USSR’s ruinous military buildup, including the creation of armadas of bombers. The country could not endure the strains of the arms race and demanded the reforms that Stalin had refused to give it.

 THE INVETERATE CONSERVATIVE

Military spending was not the only reason for a ballooning government budget during Stalin’s final years. There is copious evidence of the vozhd’s passion for large-scale, expensive projects toward the end of his life. These projects were often cast by official propaganda as “the Stalinist building of communism.” They included huge hydroelectric power plants, canals, and rail lines into the nation’s inaccessible polar reaches. To strengthen communication with newly acquired Far Eastern territories, a ferry crossing and a 13.6-kilometer underwater tunnel to the island of Sakhalin were planned, along with a rail line connecting the tunnel with the country’s train network. As was usually the case with Stalinism, behind the appealing propagandistic façade lurked an unsavory reality: communism was largely being built on the backs of prisoners.¹⁰⁶

Exorbitant spending on infrastructure once again plunged the Soviet economy into financial crisis. The chaotic proliferation of projects led to losses on uncompleted construction, which later had to be finished at far greater cost than initially projected. In 1951 and 1952 this extravagance reached its limit. Construction projects fell behind schedule and the launch of new ones was delayed. The picture was completed by stagnation in agriculture and consumer spending—the sectors that funded heavy industry. Undaunted, Stalin devised a plan for a new surge of capital investment in 1953.¹⁰⁷ At the end of his life he stubbornly repeated the mistakes of the First Five-Year Plan’s forced industrialization.

As far as can be determined from available documents, this unfolding crisis was not seriously discussed at the upper echelons of power. Until the very end Stalin demanded the expansion of heavy industry and military buildup at any cost. As in the past, he agreed to limited concessions and policy adjustments only when problems grew so severe that his hand was forced. Clearly unwilling to acknowledge the systemic crisis, he reluctantly addressed only its most obvious manifestations.

As often happened, the first signs of approaching calamity came from the most disadvantaged sector of the Soviet economy: agriculture. The Soviet countryside bore the brunt of unbalanced economic policies and of the new obligations and taxes that supported growing government expenditures. Under the inefficient kolkhoz system, agriculture was stagnant and incapable of feeding the country. The livestock situation was particularly bad. Even official Soviet statistics showed that there were no more head of cattle in the country in early 1953 than there had been in 1939, and that number was one-third less what it had been in 1928. The number of pigs in 1953 was the same as in 1928.¹⁰⁸ The numerous complaints sent to Moscow from across the country painted a desperate picture. Some of these cries for help reached Stalin.

Among the letters received in October and November 1952 and selected to be shown to Stalin were a few complaints from various parts of the USSR about the hardships suffered on collective farms.¹⁰⁹ A veterinarian from the Orekhovo-Zuevo District of Moscow Oblast, N. I. Kholodov, called for incentives for work by kolkhozniks, who were essentially forced to labor for no pay. Kholodov wrote:

According to our press, we have tremendous achievements in agriculture.… Let us take a look at how matters stand in reality. The rye was poorly harvested, poorly because there is colossal waste in the harvesting process.… The potatoes have been harvested somehow, but what kind of a harvest is this? They were dug up by workers mobilized from plants and factories who were drawing 50% of their salaries for this period, and they do not try to gather all the potatoes because they do not have an interest in this; they try to finish up as quickly as possible and gather only what is on top.…

Now let us look at animal husbandry. Even talking about it is embarrassing: annual yield of milk from year to year does not exceed 1,200–1,400 liters per forage-fed cow. This is ridiculous—it’s what you get from your average goat.¹¹⁰

Alongside these tales of dysfunction in the countryside, Stalin’s mail in late 1952 contained eloquent accounts of empty store shelves in cities. In early November the vozhd took notice of a letter from V. F. Deikina, the party secretary for a railway station in Riazan Oblast. She wrote:

It is now October, and here we have to wait in line for black bread, and sometimes you can’t get any at all, and workers are saying so many unpleasant words and they don’t believe what’s written [in newspapers] and say that we’re being deceived.… I’ll stick to the facts since there’s not enough paper to describe it all and send it in a letter.

1. You have to stand in line for black bread.

2. You can’t get white bread at all.

3. There’s neither butter nor vegetable oil.

4. There’s no meat in the stores.

5. There’s no sausage.

6. There are no groats of any kind.

7. There’s no macaroni or other flour products.

8. There’s no sugar.

9. There are no potatoes in the stores.

10. There is no milk or other dairy products.

11. There is no form of animal fat (lard, etc.).…

I’m not a slanderer and I’m not being spiteful; I’m writing the bitter truth, but that’s the way it is.… The local leadership gets everything illegally, under the table, so to speak; their underlings deliver everything to their apartments. For them the people can do as they please; that’s not their concern.… I am asking for a commission to be sent to bring the guilty to justice, to teach the right people how to plan for needs. Otherwise, those with full bellies don’t believe the hungry.¹¹¹

Despite its critical tone, this letter was entirely politically “correct.” Deikina was trying to combat the deficiencies and abuses of local officials who did not know how to properly “plan for needs.” The letter did not delve into the causes of the lack of food in the country. This was the sort of letter Stalin could like. Averky Aristov, recently appointed as the Central Committee secretary in charge of local party organizations, was sent to investigate. On 17 November 1952 Stalin held a meeting of Central Committee secretaries in his office. As Aristov recounted several years later, Stalin asked him to deliver his findings. Aristov reported that for a long time there had been shortages of bread, cooking oil, and other food items in Riazan Oblast. Stalin grew furious and ordered that the oblast party secretary be removed from his post. Aristov and others present tried to intercede on behalf of the officials from Riazan. Things were no different, they explained, in many other regions, including Ukraine, the country’s “bread basket.”¹¹²

Following the meeting, Riazan Oblast was allocated food from government supplies. Such measures, of course, did not solve the problem. The country’s leadership was again faced with the task of salvaging the agricultural sector. Under the pressure of circumstances, Stalin agreed to review proposals to raise the price paid by the state for livestock produced by kolkhozes. At stake was the fundamental question of whether peasants deserved to be compensated for their labor. The exceptionally low “purchase price” paid to kolkhozniks barely masked the fact that everything they produced for the state was basically being confiscated. Growing food was tremendously unprofitable, and those who grew it had no incentive to produce more.

In December 1952 a commission headed by Nikita Khrushchev was established to draft a resolution raising livestock purchase prices.¹¹³ After working for several weeks, the commission wound up provoking Stalin’s displeasure. The vozhd was highly suspicious of attempts to change the existing system for pumping resources out of the countryside. To the dismay of his comrades, who had agreed on an increase in livestock prices, Stalin proposed significantly increasing taxes on the peasantry. Anastas Mikoyan later recalled Stalin’s reasoning: “What is a peasant? He’ll turn over his extra hen and that’s an end to it.”¹¹⁴ Khrushchev and his politically seasoned colleagues on the commission chose the safest course of action. They bided their time. The Soviet leaders would shield themselves from Stalin’s anger while they waited for his death. When it finally came, the overdue agricultural reforms were put in place immediately and on a larger scale than initially planned. Stalin’s heirs raised procurement prices and lowered taxes on peasants. Although the deep-rooted flaws in the kolkhoz system were preserved, these measures had a positive effect. For the first time in many decades the peasants were given relief, and some improvement in agricultural production was achieved.

Reducing the financial burden on the countryside inevitably came with a reduction in extravagant spending on major infrastructure projects. Just a few days after Stalin’s death, on 10 March 1953, the chairman of Gosplan presented the new head of the Soviet government, Georgy Malenkov, a report on major construction projects that were “behind schedule for completion.”¹¹⁵ The report stated that it was being presented at Malenkov’s request. Members of the top leadership were apparently losing no time in implementing the changes they had been constrained from making while the vozhd was alive. They quickly halted many of Stalin’s ambitious projects, including the construction of canals, hydroelectrical systems, and rail lines through difficult terrain. Investment in the military was also reduced.¹¹⁶ The funds thus freed up could now be put toward dealing with the severe crises in agriculture and social welfare. The Stalinist industrialization system, enabled by the population’s low living standard and by the exploitation of the countryside as if it were an internal colony, could now be gradually dismantled.

These decisions were adopted and realized with unprecedented speed in the months following Stalin’s death. The new leaders’ decisiveness clearly shows that it was specifically Stalin who was the main obstacle to transformation for long years. Until the very end, the dictator’s personal political and economic modus operandi remained extraordinarily conservative and protective. His death opened the door to innovations that were long overdue.

 THE DEATH THROES OF THE DICTATORSHIP

At the end of his life, Stalin was at the pinnacle of his power. His authority was unassailable and not under threat from any source. But he did not feel that way. Like other dictators, he never stopped fighting for power and never quite trusted his subjects. The methods he used in his never-ending battle for power were universal and simple. They included the elimination of any potential threat from within his inner circle, unrelenting oversight of the secret police, the encouragement of competition and mutual control among the various components of government, and the mobilization of society against perceived enemies both internal and external.

After destroying the Leningraders, Stalin began adjusting the balance of power within the Politburo, creating counterweights to the growing influence of Malenkov and Beria. In 1949 he brought Ukrainian party chief Khrushchev to Moscow and made him a Central Committee secretary and head of Moscow’s party organization. Soon afterward he began to actively promote Bulganin, who had faithfully served him as defense minister. In April 1950, on Stalin’s suggestion, Bulganin was appointed first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers. For a while this promotion gave Bulganin privileged access to the vozhd. Soon, however, Stalin became disenchanted with his protégé and stripped him of his authority. This happened without particular acrimony. Bulganin remained a member of the top leadership. A period of relative equilibrium among key Politburo members set in, but it was just the calm before the storm.

An important factor in Stalin’s last battle for power was his declining health. Lightening his workload by relinquishing certain duties or gradually handing over power to subordinates was out of the question. Instead, the weakening vozhd consolidated his dictatorship with enviable energy, compensating for reduced vigor with combativeness. Fierce blows were leveled against the most vulnerable points in the hierarchy of power. The first involved yet another wave of arrests at the Ministry of State Security, over which Stalin never ceased to keep tight control. In July 1951, based on the usual assortment of trumped-up charges and incriminating denunciations, Stalin ordered the arrest of state security minister Viktor Abakumov, who quite recently had been a favorite. The party functionary Semen Ignatiev was appointed in his place. Abakumov’s arrest predictably opened the door to a large-scale purge of the ministry.

Having terrified the chekists, Stalin left for a vacation of more than four months. While in the south, he continued to keep a close eye on state security. The inventory of materials sent to Stalin between 11 August and 21 December 1951 includes more than 160 Ministry of State Security memoranda and reports. He also received an indeterminable number of coded telegrams from the ministry, as well as Politburo and Council of Ministers resolutions having to do with state security.¹¹⁷ In October Stalin summoned Ignatiev to the south and ordered him to “kick all the Jews out” of the ministry. When Ignatiev naively asked, “Where to?” Stalin explained to the inexperienced minister: “I’m not saying you should throw them out onto the street. Lock them up and let them stay in prison.”¹¹⁸ Ignatiev turned out to be a quick learner. Mortally terrified, he obediently launched a series of arrests and fabricated cases having to do with a “Zionist plot” within his ministry. For Stalin, extending his campaign of state anti-Semitism to state security was a perfectly logical step. Jews, members of a suspect nation and potential henchmen of world imperialism, could not be allowed to work in the regime’s most sacred realm. The next targets were just as logical. Immediately after state security, Stalin initiated purges against highly placed functionaries in several branches of the party-state apparat.

The next round of repression was also orchestrated from his dacha in the south. In September 1951 he received a visit from Georgia’s minister for state security, Nikolai Rukhadze. As Rukhadze testified under interrogation after his arrest, Stalin made some general comments at the dinner table about the dominance of Mingrelians (Megrels) in Georgia; he noted that Beria was a Mingrelian and was giving patronage to this group.¹¹⁹ This comment was the first hint at the target of the next campaign: Georgian officials and their patron. Soon after Rukhadze’s visit, the head of Stalin’s security team, Nikolai Vlasik, reported to the vozhd that people were complaining about having to pay bribes to enter Georgian colleges and universities. That this information fit perfectly with Stalin’s new focus is hardly surprising. Vlasik, who had spent a good portion of his life by Stalin’s side, had developed a keen sense of his moods and a talent for telling him what he wanted to hear. He could tell that Stalin was thirsting for blood and sought out the compromising materials that would help satisfy his boss’s craving. Rukhadze was assigned to look into Vlasik’s allegations.

On 29 October 1951, Rukhadze reported to Stalin that the bribery charges mostly could not be confirmed.¹²⁰ This made no difference. Stalin had decided on a purge in Georgia, and it was only a matter of time before he invented a pretext for it. On 3 November he telephoned Rukhadze and asked him for information about patronage by Georgia’s second party secretary, Mikhail Baramiia, the former procurator of the city of Sukhumi, who had been accused of taking bribes. Rukhadze did as he was told, preparing a document suggesting that Baramiia had protected Mingrelian officials guilty of crimes.¹²¹ The case was handled expeditiously. With Stalin’s active involvement, sweeping repression was unleashed in Georgia. Many of the republic’s leaders, including Baramiia, were arrested. More than eleven thousand people were deported to remote areas of the Soviet Union.¹²²

The Mingrelian and Leningrad Affairs largely followed the same template. Both started with accusations of abuse of power and political protectionism (shefstvo), quickly followed by the arrest and torture of disgraced officials, leading to fabricated evidence of “anti-Soviet” and “espionage” organizations. As in Leningrad, here too Stalin targeted a specific clan of Soviet officials with ties to influential members of the country’s leadership—in this case Beria.¹²³ Whether to make a mockery of him or simply teach him a lesson in humility, Stalin assigned Beria to hold a plenum of Georgia’s Central Committee in 1952, at which he was forced to expose his former clients and feign shock and anger at their behavior. Undoubtedly Beria saw the purge in Georgia as a personal threat. Immediately after Stalin’s death he managed to put a stop to the Mingrelian Affair and had its targets freed and returned to senior positions.¹²⁴

Beria weathered the storm. Like many before him, however, he emerged with a renewed sense of the fragility of his political and physical existence. Stalin apparently had his sights on more important targets. The first shot was fired after the Nineteenth Party Congress, which convened in October 1952 after a thirteen-year break. Instead of giving the keynote speech, Stalin limited his appearance at the congress to a brief closing statement. It was as if he was saving his diminishing strength for the main event: the plenum of the newly elected Central Committee, which immediately followed the congress. The plenum would determine the makeup of the party’s top governing bodies, most important the Politburo. The election was expected to be a mere formality. Members of the Central Committee usually voted for the candidates proposed from on high without wasting their breath on discussion. But in this case Stalin caught everyone by surprise and introduced some surprising changes.

His main innovation was the abolition of the Politburo and the creation of two new bodies. The first, which formally replaced the Politburo, was called the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.¹²⁵ Whereas the Politburo had included nine members with full voting rights and two candidate members, the new Presidium was much larger, comprising twenty-five full members and eleven candidate members. The expansion would add younger and relatively unknown party leaders, giving Stalin an even freer hand in regard to his older comrades. The political essence of the reorganization was summed up, probably correctly, by Anastas Mikoyan: “Since the makeup of the Presidium was so broad, if needed, the disappearance of Presidium members out of favor with Stalin would not be so noticeable. If between congresses five or six people disappeared out of twenty-five, that would look like an insignificant change. If, on the other hand, five or six people out of nine Politburo members disappeared, that would be more noticeable.”¹²⁶

This was exactly the sort of apprehension Stalin needed to keep the will of the old guard and potential heirs in check. Not satisfied with the threat implicit in the expanded Central Committee Presidium, Stalin continued his psychological warfare. His next proposal—the creation of a nine-member bureau to serve as the Presidium leadership—was just as unexpected. In principle, the Presidium Bureau made sense. The unwieldy Presidium would hardly be capable of efficient decision making. But Stalin, as he had often done, could of course create a narrow leadership group without formal approval by the Central Committee plenum. The true purpose of this toying with democracy became immediately clear once he disclosed his proposed candidates for the bureau. It turned out that he did not feel it was possible for him to nominate two of his oldest associates—Molotov and Mikoyan—for membership. To add insult to injury, he topped off this announcement by giving the two a public tongue-lashing.

These two men—Molotov in particular—were seen within the party and among the people as the vozhd’s natural heirs. This perception is specifically why Stalin chose to publicly discredit them by making it known that he did not consider them worthy leaders of the party and the country. Just what charges he brought against Molotov and Mikoyan we do not know, as there is no verbatim transcript of the plenum. Judging by the contradictory recollections of those who took part, Stalin concocted an amalgam of political smears, bending facts and quasi-facts to his purpose. He brought up Molotov’s supposed concessions to foreign correspondents and his mistakes at the 1945 foreign ministers’ conference and claimed that Molotov, with Mikoyan’s support, had proposed raising the procurement prices for grain in order to incentivize work by the peasants. These misdeeds were painted with the brush of “rightist opportunism.” Stalin may even have mentioned Molotov’s wife and his pro-Jewish sympathies.¹²⁷ In the end, the content of the criticism mattered little. The main point was obvious: nobody was worthy of succeeding Stalin. The only hope was that he would live on for many years. Molotov and Mikoyan came to the podium to express their devotion to Stalin. This too only underscored his greatness. Stalin’s manner signaled to the gathering that Molotov’s and Mikoyan’s justifications were not worth listening to. Before Mikoyan could finish what he was saying, according to one eyewitness, Stalin gave a dismissive wave of the hand. “The hall immediately began to react very emotionally, and people started to yell: ‘Enough of your self-justification!’ … ‘Stop trying to fool the Central Committee!’ Mikoyan wanted to say something else, but the hall interrupted him and he sat back down.”¹²⁸ This demonstration of devotion to the vozhd and disdain for apostates brought the plenum to a fitting end.

Despite being anathematized, Molotov and Mikoyan formally held onto most of their official powers—and, most important, their lives—but neither they nor any other member of Stalin’s inner circle could feel truly safe. There was also alarming news coming from the country’s socialist neighbors. In November 1952, shortly after the conclusion of the Nineteenth Party Congress, the Czechoslovak party leader Rudolf Slansky was put on trial along with other senior party officials. The defendants were found guilty and executed. Recent research has shown that Stalin exercised close personal control over the Slansky trial.¹²⁹ Slansky was a Jew, and his trial served as a prelude to Stalin’s next act of intimidation: the Doctors’ Plot.

The affair that has come to be known as the Doctors’ Plot, to which Stalin devoted a significant portion of his final months, unfolded within a general campaign of state anti-Semitism. The foundation of the case was information “dug up” by state security about murderous doctors, mostly Jewish, working in government health care facilities serving the Soviet leadership. Accusations against “wrecker doctors” who supposedly killed or plotted to kill Soviet leaders was a leitmotif of the political trials of the 1930s. Toward the end of his life Stalin returned to this theme, possibly because of anxiety about his own mortality or perhaps because he saw in the fabrication of a case against Kremlin doctors a way of putting pressure on their patients. Over many months, Stalin obsessively presided over the fabrication of evidence against Jewish doctors and their supposed patrons within the Ministry of State Security. His eagerness to lash out at this group led him to spew foul threats at Ignatiev, calling state security agents obese “hippopotamuses” and promising to drive them “like sheep” and “give it to them in the mug.”¹³⁰

During October and November 1952, when the curtain had closed on the first act of the drama taking place at the upper reaches of government, Stalin approved the arrest of a number of doctors, including Petr Yegorov, head of the body that oversaw Kremlin health services; Vladimir Vinogradov, Stalin’s personal physician; and two professors, Miron Vovsi and Vladimir Vasilenko. Stalin met with the heads of state security and instructed them to use torture on the arrestees.¹³¹ On 15 November 1952, Ignatiev reported to him that these instructions had been carried out: “Means of physical coercion were used on Yegorov, Vinogradov, and Vasilenko and interrogation was intensified, especially in regard to foreign intelligence.… Two workers capable of carrying out special assignments (using physical punishment) in regard to particularly important and particularly dangerous criminals were selected and already used in this case.”¹³²

Stalin soon put the “confessions” extracted through these brutal techniques to use. On 1 December 1952, during a meeting of the Central Committee Presidium, questions tied to “wrecking within the field of medicine” and “information on the state of the USSR Ministry of State Security” were placed before the gathering. In keeping with his initial idea of collusion between “wrecker doctors” and state security “conspirators,” the main targets of Stalin’s attack were “Jewish nationalists” and chekists. At a subsequent Central Committee Presidium meeting on 4 December, a resolution titled “On the Situation in the Ministry of State Security” was adopted, calling for “active offensive actions” in intelligence work and intensified party control over the ministry. It defended the use of extreme methods in the fight against “enemies” with the idea that “Many chekists hide behind … rotten and harmful reasoning that the use of diversion and terror against class enemies is supposedly incompatible with Marxism-Leninism. These good-for-nothing chekists have descended from positions of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism to positions of bourgeois liberalism and pacifism.”¹³³ Stalin summed up this position more succinctly in a closed-door meeting: “Communists who take a dim view of intelligence and the work of the cheka, who are afraid of getting their hands dirty, should be thrown down a well head first.”¹³⁴

At some point Stalin decided that the Doctors’ Plot should be turned into a major campaign. In early January and with his active involvement, two press items were prepared: a TASS report about the arrest of a group of “wrecker doctors” and a lead article for Pravda on the same subject. The public was told of the discovery of “a terrorist group made up of doctors whose goal, using wrecking treatments, was to shorten the lives of the Soviet Union’s prominent figures.” These alleged crimes were being committed on orders from an international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization and U.S. and British intelligence services.¹³⁵ The Soviet people were urged to exercise vigilance toward enemies receiving support from the imperialist world.

The publication of these items, on 13 January 1953, launched a large-scale ideological campaign designed to inflame anti-Semitism and bring “vigilance” to a fevered pitch. There were widespread rumors of possible pogroms and the internal resettlement of Soviet Jews. In the decades that followed, these rumors evolved into assumptions that Stalin might have been planning show trials against the doctors and the removal of Jews from the European USSR to the Far East, as had been done to Caucasian peoples during the war. Recently opened archives, despite thorough searches, have revealed no direct or indirect evidence to support either assumption. Given that either show trials or a roundup of an entire ethnic group would have required tremendous logistical effort, the absence of any trace of evidence is persuasive.¹³⁶

And even the maniacal Stalin, who by now was truly ill, saw no need for a resettlement program or large-scale arrests. The Doctors’ Plot campaign was entirely sufficient to his purpose. Remaining within the realm of ideas rather than actions, it manipulated the public mood and fostered a psychology of war-readiness in the absence of any looming war, thereby distracting people from their daily hardships. The arrests of prominent doctors also forced Stalin’s comrades to live in a state of anxiety as they tried to guess what testimony would be beaten out of their physicians in the bowels of the Lubyanka. Like other similar acts of demonstrative violence, the Doctors’ Plot had a foreign-policy aspect. Some historians believe that Stalin viewed this new campaign of anti-Semitism as a means of putting pressure on his Western opponents, the United States in particular. He was using the implicit threat of anti-Semitic pogroms to extract concessions from Western leaders, who knew no other way to influence him.¹³⁷

Historians can debate whether calculation or mania played the greater role in Stalin’s final campaigns. In either case, his actions attest to a relentless striving to hold onto power until he reached the ultimate impediment: death. The final leg of the journey toward this impediment began on Saturday evening, 28 February 1953, when he invited his four currently closest comrades—Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev, and Bulganin—to his dacha for the last dinner gathering of his life. The following day his bodyguards found him paralyzed, and the agonizing over whether or not to summon members of the highly suspect medical profession began.