Stalin

THE DICTATORSHIP COLLAPSES

A conference in the Kremlin, 2–5 March 1953, and the death of Stalin.

The arrival of the doctors on the morning of 2 March 1953 fundamentally changed the situation. The very fact that they had been summoned to Stalin’s dacha meant that the seriousness of his condition was officially recognized. The doctors confirmed the worst: a stroke had brought the vozhd to death’s door. For the first time in many decades, and completely unexpectedly, the USSR was faced with a transfer of power at the highest level.

Like Lenin, Stalin had not anointed a successor or created a legal mechanism for the orderly transfer of power. Instead he did everything he could to hinder the emergence of a successor and to instill a sense of political unworthiness in his associates. By concentrating high-level decision making in his own hands, he ensured that the other members of the Politburo were poorly informed and had little authority even over those areas for which they were immediately responsible. Driven by a thirst for power, political self-centeredness, and senile emotional instability, the Soviet dictator seemed to display an “Après moi le déluge” attitude toward the post-Stalinist future.

Thus one can only marvel at the ease with which Stalin’s heirs got through the critical period of the interregnum. There were a number of reasons why they could do so. One was that even during Stalin’s lifetime his comrades had developed a certain independence and the ability to work with one another. Each oversaw a particular component of the party-state apparat. It was not unusual for them to meet without Stalin to work on specific practical matters of government. One set of administrative entities that met quite regularly were the various executive and administrative bodies that came under the Council of Ministers. Officially, Stalin headed these bodies, but he never took part in their day-to-day work. Furthermore, during his lengthy southern vacations the Politburo grew accustomed to deliberating without him. Also, the members of the leadership were united by their common terror of the dictator. Although there was competition to get closer to him, Stalin’s comrades were careful not to provoke his fury, and they worked to maintain equilibrium within the leadership group. The Leningrad Affair had shown that no one was safe. There was an elaborate interplay among the instinct for self-preservation, institutional interests, and the need to fend off threats against the system. Dealing as they did with the day-to-day challenge of keeping the country afloat, Stalin’s colleagues were keenly aware of the urgent need for change to which he seemed willfully blind. This awareness led to an informal effort to conceive solutions, whose realization was blocked only by Stalin. Gradually and inexorably, under the shadow of dictatorship, the oligarchic system took embryonic form. It was only a matter of days from the first news of Stalin’s fatal illness that the oligarchy emerged as a force.

At 10:40 on the morning of 2 March, an official meeting of the Central Committee Presidium Bureau was convened. It was the first time in many years that a meeting took place in Stalin’s Kremlin office without him. In addition to all the members of the Bureau (except for Stalin), the attendees were Molotov, Mikoyan, Nikolai Shvernik (the chairman of the Supreme Soviet), Matvei Shkiriatov (chairman of the Party Control Commission), I. I. Kuperin (head of the Kremlin’s health administration), and the neuropathologist R. A. Tkachev. For twenty minutes the group considered one matter: “The finding of the council of physicians concerning the cerebral hemorrhage of Comrade I. V. Stalin that took place on 2 March and the resulting severe state of his health.”¹ The Bureau approved the doctors’ diagnosis and established a schedule for members of the leadership to keep watch by the vozhd’s bedside. The presence of Molotov and Mikoyan, despite their being out of favor with Stalin and formally expelled from the Bureau, is of central importance. Their inclusion was an act of defiance against the vozhd and an effort to restore the old collective leadership, as well as a natural and sensible step aimed at maintaining unity in a time of crisis. The Soviet leaders, certain that Stalin would not recover, were undertaking to change the system of supreme power that he had established.

At 8:25 that evening, the same assemblage of newly fledged oligarchs again convened in Stalin’s office to consider an official medical update: “On the state of health of Comrade I. V. Stalin as of the evening of 2 March.”² With every passing hour it became clearer: Stalin had not long to live. The doctor Aleksandr Miasnikov later recalled: “On the morning of the third the council of physicians had to submit an answer to Malenkov’s question about the prognosis. The only answer we could give was a negative one: death was inevitable. Malenkov gave us to understand that he expected such a finding, but then stated that he hoped that medical measures could extend his life for a sufficient time, even if they could not save it. We understood that he was referring to the need to allow time to organize a new government and, at the same time, prepare public opinion.”³

Records indicate that on the morning of 3 March the Soviet leaders were already assuming that Stalin would not recover and planning accordingly. At noon another meeting was held, this time without any doctors, at which a resolution was adopted to report Stalin’s illness in the press and to convene a Central Committee plenum.⁴ The decision to convene a plenum signaled preparations to transfer power, even while the exact configuration of the new leadership remained an open question. Malenkov and Beria took upon themselves the task of formulating specific proposals. They had plenty of time to do so. The members of the Presidium kept vigil at Stalin’s dacha, two at a time. Malenkov and Beria were teamed for this duty, as were Khrushchev and Bulganin. The shifts lasted many hours, and there was time for far-ranging discussion.

The fourth of March marked a turning point. That day’s newspapers contained the first official announcement of Stalin’s illness. With no hope for a recovery, the only option was to accustom the country and world to the news. The same day, Beria and Malenkov prepared proposals for reorganizing the upper echelons of power that were later discussed by the leadership group, including Molotov and Mikoyan. The 4 March document containing these proposals was confiscated from the safe of Malenkov’s assistant in 1956.⁵ For now we do not know what the initial draft contained, but we do know that it outlined the main decisions that were officially adopted the following day.⁶

Stalin’s heirs completely dismantled the governmental structure he had put together during his final months of life. The expanded Central Committee Presidium created on Stalin’s orders in October 1952 was abolished with the stroke of a pen. The Central Committee’s Presidium Bureau was proclaimed to have a new membership: Molotov and Mikoyan were added, and the young protégés whom Stalin had made part of the expanded Presidium were expelled from its ranks. In essence this upset meant a return, under a new name, to the collective leadership that had once existed as the Politburo. Stalin’s title of chairman of the Council of Ministers was given to Malenkov. This title did not mean, however, that Malenkov was recognized as Stalin’s heir or that he possessed Stalin’s powers. The new system was designed to include numerous counterpoises that would protect against the appearance of a new tyrant. Malenkov, unlike Stalin, did not simultaneously hold the post of Central Committee secretary; that post was given to Khrushchev. The men designated as Malenkov’s first deputies—Beria, Molotov, Bulganin, and Kaganovich—were in no way his juniors within the nomenklatura system. This reshuffling created a balance and satisfied the interests of all the members of the top leadership. Later, none of the participants in the reorganization recalled any controversy or rancor.

This new arrangement was formally approved by the oligarchs at a joint meeting of the Central Committee plenum, the Council of Ministers, and the Supreme Soviet Presidium on 5 March 1953. Soviet dignitaries gathered in a hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace. One participant, the writer Konstantin Simonov, left the following description of the ceremony’s atmosphere:

I arrived long before the appointed time, about forty minutes early, but more than half of the participants had already gathered in the hall, and ten minutes later everyone was there. Maybe two or three people arrived less than a half hour before the start. There were several hundred people there, almost all acquainted with one another … sitting in total silence and waiting for the start. We were sitting side by side, shoulder to shoulder; we saw one another, but nobody said a word to anyone else.… Until the very start it was so quiet in the hall that if I had not sat in that silence for forty minutes myself, I would never have believed that three hundred people sitting so tightly packed could keep quiet like that.⁷

Finally the members of the presidium that was about to be voted into existence appeared. The entire event lasted forty minutes, from 8:00 to 8:40 p.m. The resolutions that the top leadership had already agreed on were, as usual, obediently approved. The Stalin factor was dealt with simply and elegantly. He was deprived of the top posts of chairman of the government and secretary of the Central Committee and then formally included in the Central Committee Presidium. From now on, whatever his physical fate, Stalin’s political future and his comrades’ liberation from his tyrannical powers were faits accomplis. As Simonov remarked, “There was a sense that right there, in the Presidium, people were freed from something that had been weighing them down, that had bound them.”⁸

Stalin endured this formal deprivation of power for only one hour. At 9:50 p.m. he died. His death was agonizing, as if in confirmation of the folk wisdom that only the righteous are granted an easy death. His daughter Svetlana, who spent her father’s final days by his side, recalled:

The death agony was horrible. He literally choked to death as we watched. At what seemed like the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry and full of the fear of death and the unfamiliar faces of the doctors bent over him. The glance swept over everyone in a second. Then something incomprehensible and awesome happened that to this day I can’t forget and don’t understand. He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on us all. The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace, and no one could say to whom or at what it might be directed. The next moment, after a final effort, the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh.⁹

Stalin’s comrades did not linger at his bedside. A half-hour later, at 10:25 p.m., they were already back in his Kremlin office, several kilometers away.¹⁰ All the main matters of state had been resolved. What remained were the funeral arrangements. The new leaders created a commission to handle these arrangements and appointed Khrushchev to head it. They also adopted a decision to place the sarcophagus with Stalin’s embalmed body in Lenin’s mausoleum. State security and the propaganda apparat were given their orders. The editor-in-chief of Pravda, Dmitry Shepilov, spent ten minutes at this meeting. One deeply symbolic detail impressed him the most: “The chair Stalin had occupied as chairman for thirty years was empty; nobody sat in it.”¹¹

For a while, the Soviet leaders were genuinely equal and united in their determination to prevent the emergence of another tyrant. After what they had endured under Stalin, they were ready to do away with the system of terror, even if that entailed some undesirable political consequences. By 3 April 1953, after the appropriate preparations, the Central Committee Presidium resolved to “fully rehabilitate and release from custody the doctors and members of their families arrested in association with the so-called Case of the Wrecker-Doctors.” Thirty-seven people were freed. The state security officers who “particularly applied themselves in the fabrication of this provocational case” were to be brought to justice.¹² The next day this resolution was announced in the newspapers, occasioning a variety of responses and a certain consternation among the vozhd’s most ardent supporters. Other political cases in which the collective leadership had a personal interest were quietly subjected to a quick review. Molotov’s wife was released from prison. Kaganovich’s brother, who had taken his own life on the eve of the war after charges of wrecking, was pronounced innocent. The Mingrelian Affair, which had cast a shadow on Beria’s reputation, was also reviewed. Many other prominent victims of political repression were set free or posthumously rehabilitated. After taking care of their own, Stalin’s heirs began to grant relative freedom to the rest of the country. They were driven in this direction not only by conscience, but also by the growing crisis that had already been apparent under Stalin. The death of the man who had been unwilling to entertain any talk of change opened the door to reforms to be implemented with amazing speed and decisiveness.

Two pillars of the dictatorship—state security and the Gulag—were significantly reformed. One symbol of this reform was a Ministry of Internal Affairs order, dated 4 April 1953, banning the use of torture against arrestees. The order recognized the problem of “arrests of innocent Soviet citizens” and “the widespread use of various means of torture: the brutal beating of arrestees; the round-the-clock use of handcuffs behind the back, in isolated cases for several months; long-term sleep deprivation; and locking up unclothed arrestees in cold punishment cells, etc.” Threatening harsh punishment of anyone who violated the order, the ministry’s leadership demanded that torture chambers be closed in prisons and that the implements of torture be destroyed.¹³ When the order was read out loud to all state security operatives, it must have made quite an impression. These reforms continued into the spring and summer of 1953, bringing major changes to the camp system. A mass amnesty announced for those convicted of non-political crimes cut the inmate population in half. Many factories and construction projects that were still using a prisoner work force and being overseen by the ministry were shut down or transferred to the economic ministries.¹⁴ A large-scale effort to rehabilitate the victims of Stalinist terror lay in the near future.

Significant changes to economic policy were made within weeks. Unwieldy construction projects were scaled down, and the rush to “build communism” and expand Soviet military capabilities that was putting such a strain on the economy was brought to a halt. The resources thus freed up were directed toward alleviating the crisis in agriculture and meeting the needs of ordinary citizens. The prices paid for agricultural products were raised, and the tax burden on peasants was reduced. A marked improvement in output, especially in the area of livestock, came with amazing speed.¹⁵ Soon there would be ambitious programs to ease the plight of ordinary citizens, including a massive effort to expand housing.

Domestic reforms were accompanied by a moderation of foreign policy. On 19 March 1953 the Council of Ministers passed a resolution calling for “an end to the war in Korea as soon as possible.”¹⁶ After tense negotiations, an armistice treaty was signed on 27 July 1953. Moscow gave its blessing to a liberalization of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. On 2 June 1953 a Council of Ministers directive spelled out Soviet objections to the policies of the East German government and called for measures to improve the republic’s political situation.¹⁷

In short, Stalin’s “ungrateful” heirs had little trouble eliminating many of the excesses for which the vozhd bore sole responsibility. Their reforms fundamentally changed the Soviet regime. It was no longer “Stalinist”; it was less brutal and more predictable and flexible. Dictatorship, as a form of government in the Soviet Union, had been dealt a blow from which it never recovered. Internal struggles at the upper reaches of government would more than once lead to power changing hands, but never again would a Soviet leader wield the sole power exercised by Stalin.