Stalin: A Biography

45. DELIVERING THE BLOW

Stalin’s mind was a stopped clock. There was no chance in 1945 that he would satisfy popular yearnings for reform. His assumptions about policy had hardened like stalactites. He knew what he was doing. If he had relaxed the regime, he would have imperilled his personal supremacy. This consideration counted more for him than evidence that his mode of rule undermined the objective of durable economic competitiveness and political dynamism. Stalin thought strictly within the frame of his worldview and operational assumptions. The habits of despotism had anaesthetised him to human suffering. The man who digested a daily multitude of facts disregarded information he found uncongenial.

Only his death or drastic physical incapacitation might have moved the mechanisms towards reform. He might easily have died in the first half of October 1945 when the condition of his heart gave him problems.¹ The years were catching up with him. He had had patches of ill health since the Revolution, and the Second World War had levied a heavy toll. At the age of sixty-six he was long past his physical prime. His cardiac problem was kept a state secret and he took a two-month vacation;² but this had been nothing unusual for him in the inter-war years. Not even the members of his entourage were initiated into the details of his condition — they were simply left to surmise that he was suffering from an illness of passing significance. Apart from his physician Vladimir Vinogradov, no one had an inkling of the medical prognosis. Politburo members knew they had to desist from any display of inquisitiveness. It would have been dangerous for Stalin to think they were aware of his growing frailty. He would instantly have suspected that a coup against him was in the offing. He needed only a scintilla of doubt about individuals to flash in his mind before consigning them to the security police.

Despite his bodily decline, he could go on ruling the USSR through the existing institutions, personnel and procedures. Stalin’s personal supremacy rested upon the maintenance of the one-party dictatorship. Ideocracy and terror remained indispensable instruments of his despotism — and he never wavered in his determination to sustain it. He did not retreat from his intentions towards the wider world and aimed at a further strengthening of the USSR’s position as a great power. He reinforced Soviet hegemony over countries on the western borders: the zone of Europe conquered by the Red Army was to be held tightly within his grasp; and opportunities were to be sought to extend the USSR’s influence in Asia. Having won the war against the Third Reich, Stalin did not intend to lose the peace to the Western Allies. At a meeting with his intimates, he ordered them ‘to deliver a strong blow’ against any suggestion of the desirability of ‘democracy’ in the USSR.³ In Stalin’s opinion, democratic aspirations in Soviet society were the unfortunate consequence of co-operation with the USA and the United Kingdom from 1941. Western politicians after 1917 had feared the spread of the revolutionary bacillus from Russia; Stalin from 1945 dreaded his USSR becoming afflicted with counter-revolutionary infections: parliaments and markets to his mind were the diseased products of the capitalist order which had to be stopped from leaching their poison into his country.

He cultivated peaceful relations with his Western allies and sought economic benefit through increased trade and loans. He allowed a widening of the scope of public debate after the war. He contemplated measures to expand the provision of industrial consumer goods. Yet already he made such any such orientation subsidiary to the achievement of other priorities. Stalin let nothing get in the way of the enhancement of the country’s military might and security — and he set about dedicating vast resources to the acquisition of his own A-bomb and to the subjugation of eastern and east-central Europe to the Kremlin. The question was not whether Stalin would rule moderately or fiercely, but how fiercely he would decide to rule. The connection between internal and external policies was intimate. Ferocity in the USSR had ramifications abroad. Equally important was the likelihood that any expected deterioration in relations with the Western Allies would induce him to reinforce repressive measures at home.

Stalin had deported several Caucasian nationalities to the wilds of Kazakhstan in 1943–4. He had arrested the various elites of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania when he reannexed those states in 1944; the victims were either shot, thrown into the Gulag or dumped in Siberian settlements. Dekulakisation and declericalisation were bloodily imposed and 142,000 citizens of these new Soviet republics were deported in 1945–9.⁴ Stalin set the intelligence agencies to work at catching anyone disloyal to himself and the state. He put Soviet POWs through ‘filtration’ camps after their liberation from German captivity. An astonishing 2,775,700 former soldiers in the Red Army were subjected to interrogation upon repatriation, and about half of them landed up in a labour camp.⁵ Everywhere the police and party were looking out for insubordination. Marxist–Leninist propaganda had regained prominence toward the end of the war, and this emphasis continued after 1945. Citizens of the USSR were to be left with no illusions: the pre-war order was going to be reintroduced with a vengeance.

The Soviet armed forces and security agencies had their hands full inside the USSR’s own borders. Even the task of feeding the army was difficult.⁶ Resistance was intense in those regions which had lain outside the USSR before the Second World War. Partisan warfare in defence of nationhood, religion and social custom was intense in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, western Belorussia and western Ukraine. Stalin was not alone in the Kremlin leadership in thinking that massive retaliation was required. The word went forth that the new borders of the USSR were permanent and non-negotiable and that its citizens would have to accept the fact or suffer the punitive consequences. Stalin was turning the country into a military camp. By assuming the title Generalissimus — like one of his heroes, Suvorov — on 28 June 1945 he signalled the regimentation he was going to imprint on Soviet public life. Uniforms, conscription and armaments were lauded. Pravda editorials were full of injunctions to obey party and government. The need for state defence was regularly conveyed by the media. There was no sense that peacetime would last long. The official media insisted that further sacrifices would be required of society.

Across the half of Europe it controlled, meanwhile, the USSR reinforced the victory achieved over Nazi Germany. The Red Army and the NKVD confined the ‘liberated’ peoples to a framework of policies favourable to the local communist parties. Stalin had been preparing for this outcome for a couple of years. Former diplomats Maxim Litvinov and Ivan Maiski, whom he had sacked when he deemed them altogether too soft on the Western Allies, continued to be charged with preparing confidential papers on the future of both Europe and the Grand Alliance.⁷ Germany’s defeat made it urgent to lay down practical guidelines for the USSR’s hegemony over eastern Europe. Stalin adopted a differentiated strategy. In Germany he aimed to maximise his influence in Prussia, which lay in the Soviet occupation zone, without causing diplomatic conflict with his allies. In the other countries he had greater flexibility but still had to tread carefully. Communists were few outside Yugoslavia and had only a small following. At first Stalin moved cautiously. While inserting communists into coalition ministries, he eschewed the establishment of undiluted communist dictatorships.

Stalin’s foreign policy beyond the countries under the Soviet Union’s direct control was complex. It never stopped evolving. He hesitated to annoy the other members of the Grand Alliance; he did not want to jeopardise his gains in eastern and east-central Europe while lacking the military capacity to match the Americans. He was also eager to get the most out of the wartime relationship with the USA. The wreckage of the war left little scope for the USSR to export grain, oil and timber to pay for imports of machinery and technology, as Stalin had done in the 1930s. An American state loan would help enormously, and for a couple of years this remained one of his prime objectives.

Simultaneously he and Molotov intended to maximise Soviet influence around the world. The blood of the Soviet wartime dead in their opinion had earned Moscow the right to assert itself just as Washington and London did. The eastern half of Europe was not the limit of their pretensions. After Mussolini’s Italian Empire collapsed, Stalin instructed Molotov to press for newly liberated Libya to be declared a Soviet protectorate. Nor was he quick to withdraw the Red Army from northern Iran, where Azeris were the majority of the population. There was talk in the Kremlin of annexing the territory to Soviet Azerbaijan — the Azerbaijani communist leadership were especially keen on this.⁸ Whether Stalin seriously expected the Western Allies to give way is unknown. Perhaps he was just chancing his arm. He was anyway realistic enough to see that the USSR would not dent the ‘Anglo-American hegemony’ in most parts of the globe until his scientists had developed bombs of the type dropped by the US Air Force on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like Hitler, Stalin had failed to understand the destructive potential of nuclear weapons. He intended to rectify the situation by putting Politburo member Beria in charge of the Soviet research programme. The task was to enable the USSR to catch up with the Americans without delay.

The Kremlin’s other inmates were no less brutal than Stalin; they would no longer have had their posts if they had not proved themselves by his amoral standards. Yet their knowledge of conditions in the USSR made several of them doubt the desirability of pre-war policies. Stalin eventually witnessed how bad things were. In summer 1946 he went by car to the Black Sea. His caravan of vehicles made slow progress. The roads were in a terrible state and Stalin and his guests, together with hundreds of guards, stopped over in many towns. He was greeted by local communist leaders who fell over themselves to show their prowess in regenerating the country after the destruction of 1941–5. In Ukraine, where the shortage of grain was already turning into famine, Stalin was served exquisitely prepared food. Each evening his table groaned with meat, fish, vegetables and fruit. But the attempts at camouflage did not work. With his own eyes he could see at the roadsides that people were still living in holes in the ground and that wartime debris lay everywhere — and this, according to his housekeeper Valentina Istomina, made Stalin nervous.⁹ If he had travelled in his railway carriage FD 3878, he would have missed seeing this.

He got over such concerns. He was not going to alter policies merely because most citizens, after a gruelling war, were hungry and destitute. He was confident that he could continue to impose a state budget that minimised attention to popular well-being. Politburo members soon understood this. If they wanted to influence the programme of party and government, they had to be wary about how they presented their ideas to the Leader — and sometimes they overestimated his level of tolerance. Several ideas were put into public discussion after 1945. Politburo members had to do this with caution if they were to survive not just politically but also in a physical sense. But they were also useless to Stalin if they failed to offer a strategic view on the USSR’s difficulties. He demanded this of his subordinates; they were not allowed merely to administer existing policies. Stalin had a talent for getting them to reveal what was in their minds. This was not very difficult since he had the power of life and death over them. At the same time they knew this and yet had to pretend to him and to themselves that they did not. While Stalin remained alive, they had to play the game according to his rules.

Several of them — Beria, Malenkov and Khrushchëv — later showed an understanding that the degree of the regime’s repressiveness was counter-productive. There was an economic aspect to this. When the annual accounts were drawn up, it became crystal-clear that the Gulag forced-labour system cost the state more than it earned in revenues; and monetary incentives began to be introduced to raise productivity in the camps.¹⁰ This was hardly surprising. The wretches who worked with inadequate food and medical care in Siberia and northern Russia did not operate with the efficiency of free men and women. In order to hold them captive, moreover, a vast legion of administrators, guards, railwaymen and secretaries was required. This system of unofficial slavery was not the most cost-effective way to obtain timber, gold and uranium. But nobody could afford to say this directly to the Leader for fear of joining the slave-gangs. But the truth of the Gulag was known in the supreme ruling group.

Other parts of Stalin’s programme also gnawed at the minds of several Politburo members. Malenkov was later to espouse the cause of light industry; he especially advocated the need to increase industry’s commitment to the production of consumer goods. Beria was subsequently concerned that official policy continued to offend those who did not belong to the Russian nation; he also objected to the extreme controls over cultural self-expression. Khrushchëv, with his sense of the rudimentary requirements of most citizens, felt that agrarian reform was vital. About foreign policy it was even more dangerous to express an opinion; and after the initial debate about the chances of the world communist movement Stalin clamped down: it remained for leading Soviet politicians on Stalin’s death — again it was Beria and Malenkov — to insist that a Third World War would be a disaster for the human race. Beneath the surface of official politics there was appreciation that something had to change. Several Politburo members understood that the rigidities of Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism after the war provided no permanent solution. Things had to change not only for the good of the members of the Politburo but also in order to conserve the power and prestige of the USSR.

While Stalin lived, however, his policies were unchallengeable. He was not completely inflexible and some wartime ‘compromises’ remained in place. He did not abandon the wartime understanding with the Russian Orthodox Church. Those churches which had been reopened in the war continued to function, and the Patriarch agreed to act as unofficial ambassador for the ‘peace policy’ of the Soviet government — and the Russian Orthodox Church avidly occupied buildings which had previously belonged to other Christian denominations.

Stalin also persisted with the ideological favour shown to the Russians in wartime. This was obvious in historical textbooks. Before 1941 it was still acceptable to show respect for those who resisted the expansion of the Russian Empire. Shamil, the Moslem cleric who fought the armies of Nicholas I and Alexander II in Dagestan and Chechnya, was given his due as an anti-tsarist hero. After the Second World War his reputation was consistently blackened. Indeed each and every figure in the pre-revolutionary past who had failed to welcome the armies of the tsars was condemned as reactionary. Russia had allegedly brought culture, enlightenment and order to its borderlands. The treatment of Shamil was a litmus test of the development of policy on the national question. So too was the visual symbolism of the urban landscape. For the octocentenary celebration of Moscow’s foundation in September 1947, Stalin commissioned a statue of Prince Yuri Dolgoruki for erection on Gorki Street. Its chain-mailed muscularity was designed to induce awe at the greatness of medieval Muscovy.¹¹ Stalin’s toast to the Russian nation on 24 May 1945 had been no fleeting fancy.

Even the limits of cultural expression were as wide as they had been in the war. In the arts and scholarship the situation remained marginally freer than before the Great Patriotic War. The composer Shostakovich and the poet Akhmatova still wrote pieces for public performance. Scholars, too, went on benefiting from a working environment which was less stringent than before the war.

The level of material provision for Soviet citizens continued to exercise the minds of Stalin and his government; they remained cognisant of the high level of expectations among the peoples of the USSR once the war had been won. Initially Stalin did not plan for an economy of shortage. Although he imposed heavy control over politics, he still aimed to expand the supply of food and industrial products through the retail trade. Several governmental decrees confirmed this purpose in 1946–8.¹² There was much talk about stimulating the production and distribution of consumer goods, and it was recognised that some reorganisation of commercial structures would be needed.¹³ For this to happen there also had to be an end to wartime inflation. In December 1947 party and government abruptly announced a devaluation of the ruble. The savings of citizens were automatically reduced to a tenth of what they had been. A decree was passed in the same month to terminate the ration-book system: Soviet citizens had to buy what they could with the rubles in their pocket or under their mattress.¹⁴

The USSR was not the only state to take drastic action for post-war economic regeneration. Yet few governments behaved with so little regard for the difficulties posed for consumers. Announcements were made suddenly and without warning. Stalin had always ruled that way. He expected ‘the people’ to accept docilely what he demanded. Although he irritated millions of citizens by devaluing the currency, he scarcely induced their ruination: the reason they had had so much money was that they could not find the goods to spend it on. His own savings were depreciated by the devaluation decree; but he had never been a materialistic man. Unopened pay-packets were found at his Blizhnyaya dacha when he died. What mattered to Stalin was not wealth but power. In any case he and his close subordinates were protected by the network of special shops from any untoward financial effects. Stalin had for a long time intimidated those reporting to him into playing down news of hardship. It was in 1947 that a terrible famine occurred across Ukraine. Khrushchëv had to deal with it as party boss in Kiev. While appealing to the Kremlin for assistance, he was careful lest Stalin should conclude that he had gone soft. Stalin therefore did not hear how bad the situation was.¹⁵

Yet even Khrushchëv’s cautious words got him into trouble: ‘Stalin sent me the rudest, most insulting telegram which said I was a suspect person: I was writing memoranda to try and show that Ukraine could not fulfil its state procurement [quotas], and I was requesting an outrageous amount of ration-cards to feed people.’¹⁶ Stalin was not responsible for the drought that had ruined the 1946 harvest. But he remained the founder and director of the collective-farm system and his ferocious rejection of the request for aid to Ukraine makes him culpable for the deaths of millions of people in the famine of the late 1940s. Cases of cannibalism occurred. The experience seared itself into Khrushchëv’s consciousness. He had come to understand the idiotic brutality of the Soviet economic order. Stalin was incapable of such a reaction. Like Lenin, he hated any sign of what he regarded as sentimentality; and both Lenin and Stalin tended in the first instance to assume that any reports of rural hardship were the product of peasants tricking urban authorities into indulging them.¹⁷

Not that Stalin and his central subordinates controlled everything. They concentrated on restoring authority over those sectors of state and society where authority had prevailed before 1941. Sometimes, but not always, this involved a shift in the content of policy. Yet this hardly makes it sensible to call this a period of ‘high Stalinism’ even though several Western scholars have liked to claim that the post-war years were unique. In fact Stalin’s actions were mostly reactionary: he was reverting the Soviet order to the template he had more or less imposed before Operation Barbarossa. Yet society in Russia and its borderlands had never been completely regulated by the Kremlin. The old amalgam of regimentation and chaos persisted. Several groups in society were more overt in asserting their wishes than before the war. Most obvious, of course, were the partisans in the newly annexed territories in the west of the USSR. The Gulag too was no longer quiescent. The arrest of Ukrainian and Baltic dissenters introduced into the labour camps an intransigent element, sustained by religious faith and national pride, which had hardly been noticed in the Gulag complex before the war.

If a totalitarian state could not stop protests and strikes in its detention zones, something was wrong — and several of the Kremlin leaders were aware of this even if they kept the knowledge secret from Stalin. The unrest in the Gulag happened despite the intensification of repressive campaigns. Even in the more established parts of the USSR there were aspects of belief and behaviour which remained stubbornly unamenable to political manipulation. The coercive agencies in the war had concentrated their efforts on eradicating defeatism. Yet many people, especially youngsters, simply wanted to get on with their personal lives without the state’s interference. Western music and, in some instances, even Western clothes fashions were adopted by young people.¹⁸ The alienation of Muscovite students in particular was pronounced. And skilled workers also refused to be gulled by official propaganda; they knew their value to industrial enterprises which were under instructions to raise production sharply. Labour discipline, no longer backed by legal sanctions as severe as in the pre-war years, was seldom enforceable.

It was dangerous to present Stalin with reports on phenomena which he might blame on the person who was reporting. His associates censored themselves in communication with him.¹⁹ He ruled through the institutions and appointees he himself had put in place. He never visited a factory, farm or shop in the post-war years (apart from a trip to a market in Sukhum; this had also been no different in the 1930s).²⁰ He received no visitors from outside the political milieu except for the brief sojourn of his childhood friends at one of his Black Sea dachas.²¹ He experienced the USSR and the world communist movement on paper in the form of decrees, reports and denunciations. He could not know everything.

Stalin’s inability to eradicate apathy, chaos and disobedience continued. His was the primary responsibility for the decision to deliver a blow against popular aspirations to some permanent relaxation of the Soviet order. Assumptions that changes would be put in hand at the end of the war were crudely disappointed. The question arises of whether the life of workers, kolkhozniks and administrators would have been radically different if Stalin had died at the moment of military victory. The answer can only be guessed at, but it is difficult to see how such a regime could have remained in power if it had failed to continue to apply severe repression. The ruin of cities, villages and whole economic sectors placed a vast burden on the state budget. Things were made worse by security concerns. The race to develop nuclear weaponry was bound to be extremely costly for the Soviet Union. Although friendly diplomatic relations with the USA and even American financial assistance could have alleviated the situation, the essential problem would have remained: society below the level of the central and local elites was therefore likely to be asked to shoulder the burden in the form of a delay in improving living conditions — and without the Gulag and the security police agencies this was a situation which could not have been maintained.²²

Stalin’s associates needed to conserve the powers of repression if they wanted to survive. The moderation of many policies was not excluded by this; and in fact his associates quietly suggested a number of modifications to economic, national and foreign policy. But none of them was a procedural democrat or an advocate of a market economy. Stalin had them in personal thrall. But it was not just his terrifying nature which stopped radical reform from being attempted. The Soviet order had its own internal imperatives. It had never been as adaptive as capitalist societies in the West, and the conditions after the Second World War rendered its inflexibilities stronger than ever. Stalinism would outlast Stalin.

46. THE OUTBREAK OF THE COLD WAR

The USSR’s relationship with the world of capitalism was always volatile. The October 1917 Revolution shook the global order like an earthquake and the tremors were registered in the politics and diplomacy of both the Bolsheviks and their enemies in the West. No government thought the rivalry could forever remain unresolved. The axiom was that permanent coexistence was impossible and that one side or the other would eventually triumph. Yet the communist leaders concurred that direct military conflict should be avoided. Truman, Attlee and Stalin agreed on this without the need to discuss it; and when Stalin was asked his opinion by visiting foreign communists, he insisted that the Third World War which he and they as Marxist–Leninists regarded as inevitable was not going to happen. He thought his will and judgement superior to those of his counterparts in the West. He also believed in the greater internal strength of the communist order in a potential conflict with capitalist states. Communism had spread fast in Europe and Asia. Nuclear-weapon technology had been a sector of Soviet weakness but he was doing something about this. He had allocated the resources to acquire parity for his armed forces and aimed to catch up with the USA in military power.

The USSR’s agreements with Western governments, from the commercial treaties of 1921 onwards, had been regarded by everyone on both sides as suspendable. Subsequent events confirmed this approach. In 1924 the United Kingdom tore up the treaty signed with Sovnarkom in 1921. The Japanese in 1938 and the Germans in 1941 went to war with the USSR despite earlier concordats. The coalition which Stalin formed with the United Kingdom and the USA in the Second World War had from the start been characterised by strain and suspicion. The leaders of the Grand Alliance had lived on their nerves. Only their common anti-Nazi interest had kept them on speaking terms. Communism and capitalism dealt uneasily with each other.

Yet this does not explain why the coalition broke down when and in the way it did. Stalin had spent the war ranting about the perfidy of his foreign partners; and Truman had few illusions about the ruthless ambitions of the Soviet leader. It was not just a question of clashing ideologies and personalities. The states of the Grand Alliance had divergent interests. The United Kingdom wished to preserve its empire intact while the USSR and the USA aspired to have it dismantled. The USA aimed at hegemony in Europe and the Far East: this was bound to agitate the Soviet political leadership after the protracted struggle against Germany and Japan. Yet the USSR had brought eastern and east-central Europe under its direct dominion despite the Grand Alliance’s promise to liberate all nations from wartime subjugation. The fact that the Soviet economy, apart from its armaments sector, was in ruins strengthened Truman’s confidence. The USA flexed the muscles of its financial and industrial might around the globe, and until 1949 the USA had atomic weapons and the USSR had none. This was a dangerous world situation. The practical moves of Stalin and Truman had to be calculated with care if military conflict was to be avoided.

Stalin was given an inkling of future difficulty even as the Germans were going down to defeat. Lend–Lease aid was stopped without warning on 8 May 1945, and the ships on the high seas were ordered back to the USA. The USSR had served its military purpose for the Americans; it now had to show it deserved any further assistance. American actions in western Europe conformed to this pattern. Both overt and clandestine support was given to political groups in France and Italy dedicated to undermining the growth of communist influence. A blind eye was turned to General Franco’s advocacy of Hitler’s cause as Spain too was brought under American hegemony. The British assisted royalist forces in Greece in crushing the large armed units of communists. The Truman administration pursued the military and economic interests of American capitalism on every continent. Air force bases were acquired in Africa and Asia.¹ Pro-Washington dictatorships were helped to power in Central and South America. The British and Americans intervened in the Middle East to guarantee their access to cheap oil and petrol. American general Douglas MacArthur was given plenipotentiary authority in Japan until such time as he could establish a state in line with the USA’s political orientation.

The British Empire was in decline, and Stalin cannot have been surprised that the Americans were eager to expand their political and military hegemony over the maximum number of countries. As the United Kingdom’s weakness was exposed, world politics became contest between the USSR and the USA. Stalin had to manoeuvre carefully. Negotiations to found the United Nations Organisation had begun in San Francisco in April 1945. Stalin wished to have the USSR made a member of the Security Council and to secure a right of veto within it. Molotov negotiated on Stalin’s orders. It was not a congenial experience as the Americans were no longer worried about the sensitivities of their Soviet interlocutors.²

The policies of the USSR became clearer in 1946. By then Churchill was out of office but his speech at Fulton, Missouri on 5 March rejected any attempt at conciliation. Churchill spoke of an ‘iron curtain’ drawn down the centre of Europe by Stalin and the communist leadership. Concessions to the USSR should cease. Churchill was summarising what Truman had said in piecemeal fashion since the outset of his Presidency. But this left a lacuna in Anglo-American strategic thought. It was filled by a telegram sent from Moscow by American diplomat George Kennan on 22 February. Kennan argued that the Western Allies should seek to ‘contain’ their global adversary rather than use military force. By their further development of nuclear weapons the Americans also could deter the USSR from adventurism and aggression. This was the core of American state doctrine over succeeding years, and any member of the USA’s leadership who challenged it was removed. President Truman became ever more assertive in his diplomatic dealings. The British were helpmates rather than decision-makers, but they approved the new orientation; and Stalin, regularly supplied with information from his intelligence agencies, knew that limits had been placed on his activity in global affairs if he wished to avoid armed confrontation with a stronger enemy.

The year 1947 pivoted the Grand Alliance towards open disharmony. Several events increased the mutual antipathy. Every crisis strengthened the belief of leading politicians, including Truman and Stalin, that their chronic suspicion of the rival power and its leader had been justified. Resumed co-operation would be difficult. The Allies lurched into the Cold War. Truman and Stalin spoke fractiously about each other. Each felt empowered by military victory to enhance his state’s influence in the world and to ensure that his rival — whether in Washington or in Moscow — did not get away with anything.

The USSR had gone on flexing its muscles after the Second World War without getting into a fight. Avoidance of a Third World War was the supreme immediate priority. Little was done in the Far East. Stalin accepted that the Americans had unchallengeable control of Japan and its political and economic development; he contented himself with possession of the Kurile islands obtained in accord with the Yalta agreements. He also concluded that prolonged occupation of northern Iran by the Red Army would endanger relations with the USA. The Western Allies repeatedly demanded the withdrawal of Soviet armed forces, and in April 1947 Stalin at last acceded to this. The Iranian government proceeded to suppress separatist movements in the north of its country. But the Soviet Army pulled back, never to return. Stalin simultaneously tried to put pressure on Turkey for territorial concessions. In this instance President Truman’s robust defence of Turkish sovereignty saved the situation from developing into an emergency. Stalin’s chimerical ambitions to turn Libya into a protectorate of the USSR were also quietly abandoned after British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin flew into a rage in negotiations with Soviet diplomats.³

The serious trouble started on 5 June 1947 when US Secretary of State George Marshall announced economic assistance to European countries which had suffered from Nazi aggression. The offer was also available to the USSR, and Stalin’s original scheme had been for representatives of Bulgaria and Romania to attend the subsequent exploratory gathering in Paris with the purpose of disrupting it; but he had second thoughts, becoming convinced that a ‘Western block against the Soviet Union’ was being organised.⁴ Marshall intended to undermine Soviet hegemony over the countries of eastern Europe by providing them with American financial help. The Ministry of External Affairs in Moscow explored whether funds really would be released to the USSR for its post-war recovery. The answer was that the Americans made open markets the condition for aid. As Truman and Marshall knew, there was never any chance that Stalin and his associates would accept such restrictions. The Marshall Plan was tied to the geopolitical objectives of the USA and these included the drastic reduction of the USSR’s power in Europe. Even Jeno Varga, who had suggested the possibility of a parliamentary road to communism in Europe, saw the Marshall Plan as a dagger pointed at Moscow.⁵ Moderation in Soviet foreign policy came to a halt. Thus began the Cold War, so called because it never involved direct military conflict between the USSR and the USA.

Having conquered eastern Europe, Stalin would not relinquish his gains. He held to a traditional view of security based on buffer states. This was an approach soon to be made obsolete by long-range bombers and nuclear missiles. It also overlooked the huge onus taken upon itself by the USSR in occupying these countries and becoming responsible for their internal affairs. Most communist leaders in eastern Europe anticipated Stalin’s reaction and broke off negotiations with the Americans in Paris.

Yet the Czechoslovak government, which included communist ministers, was eager to go to Paris to discuss Marshall’s proposals. A delegation led by Klement Gottwald was received in Moscow on 10 July 1947. Stalin was furious:⁶

Communist leader Gottwald left his liberal Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk to twist in the wind. Masaryk asked Stalin to bear in mind Czechoslovak industry’s dependence on the West; he added that the Poles had wished to go to Paris. But Stalin was unmoved. Resistance crumbled, and Masaryk begged Stalin and Molotov to help the Czechoslovaks to formulate the text of their withdrawal from participation. Stalin simply advised him to copy the Bulgarian model. Masaryk salvaged a scrap of national pride by pointing out that the government would not be meeting until the following evening; but the entire delegation ended by thanking Stalin and Molotov for the ‘necessary pieces of advice’.⁷

Stalin was flinging mud in the face of the USA, and the world was his witness. Overnight it became easier for Truman to get his way with governments which had doubts about the hardening American line towards the USSR; he was also helped in his campaign to convince the US Congress that financial aid at least to western Europe lay among the objective interests of the USA. Stalin had been pushed to the point of strategic decision. He confronted a definite challenge: the American President wanted to pull the greatest possible number of European states under his country’s hegemony and to bring benefit to its industrial and commercial corporations. The USSR’s economy remained in a desperate plight and the Americans had no objective incentive to facilitate its recovery. Even so, Stalin could have handled the situation with more finesse. Instead of tossing the terms back in Truman’s face, he could have drawn out the negotiations and proved to the world that the apparent altruism of the Marshall Plan concealed American self-interest. But Stalin had made up his mind. He never again met Truman after Potsdam and did not seek to. Nor could he be bothered with negotiating with Western diplomats. The USA had thrown down the gauntlet and he would pick it up.

Even so, the Americans declined to go further in trying to detach eastern Europe from the USSR. The policy of containment was interpreted as involving acceptance that such countries fell within the zone of Soviet influence. The chance of liberating these countries had been at its highest in 1945. Western public opinion could be manipulated, but only to a certain extent two years later. The Americans and the British had been taught to respect ‘Uncle Joe’; they had also been told that the war would be over when Germany and Japan had been defeated. It would not have been easy to induce British or American soldiers to start fighting in mid-1947.

Soviet retaliation against the American initiative was not long in coming. In September 1947 a conference of communist parties was convoked at Sklarska Poręba in Poland. Stalin did not deign to attend. Having ordered the creation of a tight system of co-ordination by telephone and telegram, he sent Zhdanov on his behalf. Zhdanov had been well briefed and contacted Moscow whenever anything unpredicted arose. The organisational objective was to form an Informational Bureau (or Cominform) to co-ordinate communist activity in the countries of eastern Europe as well as in Italy and France. As relations worsened with the USA, Stalin withdrew permission for a diversity of national transitions to communism. The call was made for an acceleration of communisation in eastern Europe; and, in western Europe, the French and Italian parties were reprimanded for their reluctance to drop their parliamentary orientation (even though it had been Stalin who had instigated it!). The completion of a rigid communist order was the goal to the east of the Elbe. Stalin also had his ambitions elsewhere. He intended to disrupt ‘Anglo-American’ hegemony in western Europe by the sole political means to hand: communist party militancy.⁸

Yet blatant American interference in the Italian elections through subsidies to the Christian-Democratic Party proved effective. In the two halves of Europe the armed camps of former allies confronted each other. Ambiguity, however, remained over Germany, where the USA, the USSR, the United Kingdom and France had occupying forces in their respective zones. Each of these powers also controlled its own sector in Berlin, which lay within the USSR’s zone.

Stalin, annoyed and frustrated by developments, decided to probe Western resolve at an early opportunity. Soviet representatives proposed the formation of a united German government. The condition for this would be Germany’s demilitarisation. Stalin seemed to want either a communist or a neutral Germany as his further aim. He also aspired to an increase in reparations to the USSR. On 24 June 1948 Stalin started a blockade of the American, British and French zones of the city. Unable to secure the kind of Germany he found acceptable, he opted to cut off the eastern zone under the USSR’s occupation from the rest of the country. The Soviet Army patrolled the border. Confrontation was inevitable, but Stalin gambled on the Western Allies being unwilling to risk war. He miscalculated. The Americans and British flew in supplies to their sectors of Berlin, and it was Stalin himself who had to decide whether to begin military hostility. The Berlin airlift continued through to May 1949. Stalin gave up. Western resolve had been tested and found to be too firm. Relations between the USSR and the USA deteriorated. A Western initiative inaugurated the Federal Republic of Germany in September 1949. In October the Kremlin sanctioned the German Democratic Republic’s creation in response.

This was a turbulent environment. Like everyone else, Stalin was surprised by particular events and situations, and much of his time was spent on reacting to successive emergencies. Yet nothing happened which challenged his general operational assumptions about global politics. He did not expect favours from the Americans, and the Marshall Plan confirmed his darkest suspicions. The phrase used by Zhdanov at the founding Cominform Conference about the existence of ‘two camps’ in perpetual, unavoidable competition appeared prophetic. First to form an overt military alliance was the capitalist camp. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) came into existence in April 1949. Under the USA’s leadership it included the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada, Belgium, Holland, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and Luxemburg. Greece and Turkey joined three years later and the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955. Most countries in North America and western Europe adhered to NATO: it was a mighty and coherent alliance with the obvious but unstated purpose of seeing off any Soviet attack; and for all its European members its great virtue lay in binding the American government and military forces into their endeavour to keep the Soviet Army behind the Iron Curtain. In 1936 there had been an Anti-Comintern Pact; in 1949 an Anti-Cominform Pact had been established in all but name.

Western security concerns were increased on 29 August 1949 when Soviet scientists successfully tested their own A-bomb. Beria had used the ebullient Igor Kurchatov as the technical chief of the project. Kurchatov assembled a team of capable physicists. Soviet intelligence agencies handed over secret material taken by their agents from the Americans, and this hastened progress. The quest for uranium was facilitated by the consignment of hundreds of thousands of repatriated POWs to the mines in Siberia. Few survived the experience. By mid-1949 the USSR, from its own mines as well as from deposits in Czechoslovakia, had acquired sufficient plutonium and uranium-235 to go ahead with the construction of a Soviet bomb.⁹

Stalin took an active interest. The main figures in the research project were called before him in a lengthy meeting. Each had to report on his progress, and Stalin fired questions at them. Mikhail Pervukhin had to explain to him the difference between heavy water and ordinary water.¹⁰ He told Stalin what he needed to know. Not having studied physics at the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary, the Leader started with only the most rudimentary grasp of the scientific principles. His ignorance had earlier been downright dangerous for the scientists. Having recently re-read Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism, he was convinced that space and time were absolute, unchallengeable concepts in all human endeavours. (This contrasted with his dismissal of the controversy over the same book before the First World War as ‘a storm in a teacup’.)¹¹ Einsteinian physics were therefore to be regarded as a bourgeois mystification. The problem was that such physics were crucial to the completion of the A-bomb project. Beria, caught between wanting to appear as Stalin’s ideological apostle and wishing to produce an A-bomb for him, decided he needed clearance from the Boss for the Soviet physicists to use Einstein’s equations. Stalin, ever the pragmatist in matters of power, gave his jovial assent: ‘Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later.’¹²

Kurchatov and his team pulled it off in the desert outside Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan — and to his amazement, as the mushroom cloud gathered on the horizon, he was hugged by Beria. Such a display of emotion was unprecedented. But Beria, who had spent the past four years threatening Kurchatov, had lived under the same shadow cast by Stalin. A failed bomb test could have led to his death sentence. Instead he could report success to the Kremlin. Stalin was also delighted. The USSR had entered the portals of the world’s nuclear-powers elite, and Stalin himself could come to any future diplomatic negotiations as the equal of the American and British leaders.

This in turn opened him to persuasion that the USSR should assume an assertive posture in world politics. There were other reasons for his ebullience. Not only had the communist subjugation of eastern Europe occurred without serious setbacks but also the Chinese Communist Party had seized power in Beijing in October 1949. Communism had acquired possession of a third of the world’s land surface. Mao Tse-tung had won his victory in the teeth of Stalin’s reluctance to support him against the nationalist Chiang Kai-shek. The revolutionary outcome in China did not soften Stalin’s attitude to Mao: he expected the new communist state to submit itself to the higher interest of world communism as delineated by Moscow. In practice this meant accepting the priority of Soviet needs over Chinese ones. Stalin continued to regard it as the USSR’s right to hold on to Port Arthur as a military base and to dominate Manchuria. The USSR’s military superiority and its willingness to render economic assistance compelled Mao to bite his tongue when he made a lengthy visit to Moscow from December 1949. The direct talks between Mao and Stalin became tricky when Stalin made clear from the start that he would not repeal the Sino-Soviet treaty of 1945, which had been concluded at a moment of China’s extreme weakness and before the communist seizure of power.¹³

Mao did not secure all the military and economic assistance he was after. Stalin assured him that China was not yet threatened by foreign powers: ‘Japan is still not back on its feet and is therefore not ready for war.’¹⁴ As usual he added that the USA was in no mood for a big war. Stalin, hoping to distract his Chinese comrade with a campaign which would not upset the Soviet–American relationship, advised that Beijing should confine itself to conquering Taiwan and Tibet. Mao’s frustration grew. Having taken power in China only weeks before, he was almost under house arrest at a government dacha outside Moscow as Stalin and he conferred. But then on 22 January 1950 Stalin suddenly reversed his position and told Mao of his willingness to sign a new Sino-Soviet treaty.

The question arises as to who or what was to blame for the descent into the Cold War. President Truman played his part. His language was hostile to the USSR and communism. The Marshall Plan in particular was framed in such a way as to make it well nigh inconceivable that Stalin would not take offence. Yet at the start even Molotov was inclined to accept the aid.¹⁵ Truman was determined to promote the American economic cause in the world; he also had a genuine concern about the oppression which his predecessor’s deals with Stalin had spread across eastern Europe. The USA had an economy undamaged by war and a society which, apart from its soldiers, had no direct experience of it. Its state and people were committed to the economics of the market. Its economic interest groups sought access to every country of the world. It was a military power greater than any rival. The USA did not threaten to declare war on the USSR, but it acted to maximise its hegemony over world politics and the result was a set of tensions which could always spill over into diplomatic confrontation or even a Third World War.

There remained the speculation that, if the wartime negotiations had demanded more of Stalin, the situation might not have arisen; yet not only Roosevelt but also Churchill had made commitments to him which were difficult to overturn unless the Anglo-Americans were willing to break with Stalin entirely. Even Churchill was averse to a military incursion over the agreed boundaries between the hegemonic zones of the USSR and its Western allies. Churchill had a long memory. At the end of the First World War many socialist and labour militants had been active in opposing military intervention in Soviet Russia after the Civil War. But from 1945 it was Attlee who governed the United Kingdom, and no public figure of importance advocated an incursion over the River Elbe. Truman and Attlee might well have had trouble mobilising popular support for any such action. The troops of the USA and the UK had been trained to regard the Soviet forces as allies. Civilians had heard the same propaganda. Germany and Japan had been identified as the only enemies and the task of orientating public opinion towards active military measures would have been extremely difficult. The chance had been lost at Yalta, Tehran and Potsdam — and even at those three Allied Conferences it would have been a tricky feat to pull off without trouble at home.

The USA and USSR were great powers which assumed that permanent unrivalrous coexistence was an implausible prospect. Stalin, moreover, was more active than Truman in making things worse. He grabbed territory. He imposed communist regimes. He anyway took it for granted that clashes with ‘world capitalism’ were inevitable. Indeed he was mentally more ready for war than were the American and British leaders. The Cold War was not unavoidable but it was very likely. The surprise is that it did not become the Hot War.

47. SUBJUGATING EASTERN EUROPE

There was little interference with the USSR’s actions in Soviet-occupied eastern Europe after the Second World War. Truman and Attlee grumbled but they did not act far outside the scope of the agreements at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam. The tacit deal remained in place that the USSR could get on with its military occupation and political domination while the USA, the United Kingdom and France imposed their control in the West. Stalin had small acquaintance with his vast zone. He had been to Kraków, Berlin and Vienna on his trip before the First World War, but his subsequent interest had been limited to the internal affairs of the Comintern. Yet he was a fast learner when events drove the need for knowledge. Already in the Second World War, as Hitler occupied countries near the USSR, Stalin took account of the situation in consultation with Dimitrov and Litvinov. He also recognised that unless communist parties adopted a more obviously national image they would never succeed in appealing to their electorates. He had planned in 1941 to abolish the Comintern. In 1943 this aim was fulfilled. Behind the scenes, though, the International Department of the Party Central Committee Secretariat commanded the foreign communist parties everywhere. Once given, orders were obeyed.

Stalin’s concern with countries of the region grew as the end of the war approached. In Moscow he received representatives of the communist parties. In January 1945 he discussed economic aid, military dispositions and even the official language, frontiers and foreign policy of the Yugoslav state with Tito’s emissaries. Informed of their desire to form a huge federation with Bulgaria and Albania, he urged caution. Continually he cajoled the Yugoslav leaders, who were more cocksure than others in eastern Europe, to ask his opinion in advance of large-scale action.¹

Regular reports and requests came to Moscow after the war, and Stalin went on meeting communist visitors. His ability to issue impromptu decisions was extraordinary. In 1946 he had even set the timing of the following year’s elections in Poland.² Polish President Bolesław Bierut prefaced his discussion with the following obeisance: ‘We’ve journeyed to you, comrade Stalin, as our great friend in order to report our consideration on the course of events in Poland and check on the correctness of our evaluation of the political situation in the country.’³ His control over eastern Europe was facilitated by the consolidation of communism’s organisational network across the region with the protection of the Soviet armed forces. Years of subordination, enforced by terror, ensured compliance. Communist leaders, with the exception of the Yugoslavs and perhaps the Czechs, also knew how weak their support was in their countries: dependency on the USSR’s military power was crucial for their survival. New police agencies were set up on the Soviet model, and Moscow infiltrated and controlled them. Soviet diplomats, security officials and commanders monitored eastern Europe as if it was the outer empire of the USSR.

Problems awaited the Kremlin across the region. Communists in eastern Europe had suffered persecution before and during the Second World War. Their organisations were frail, their members few. Most of their leaders were popularly regarded as Soviet stooges. Communism was envisaged as a Russian pestilence, and the Comintern’s dissolution had not dispelled this impression. It did not help the cause of national communists that the USSR seized industrial assets as war reparations in Germany, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. The presence of the Soviet security police and the Red Army — as well as the continuing gross misbehaviour of Soviet troops — exacerbated the situation. A further problem for communist parties was the high proportion of Jewish comrades in their leaderships. Anti-semitism in eastern Europe was not a Nazi confection, and Jews in the communist leaderships bent over backwards to avoid appearing to favour Jewish people: indeed they often instigated repression against Jewish groups.⁴ Yet Stalin had no patience with the difficulties experienced by the foreign communist parties. He had set down a political line; and if problems arose, he expected Molotov or some other subordinate to resolve them.

Stalin and his underlings in the USSR and eastern Europe did not lack self-assurance. History helped them. While installing non-democratic political systems in eastern Europe, they proceeded in accordance with local tradition in most cases. Nearly all countries in the region had possessed authoritarian governments, even dictatorships, between the world wars. Czechoslovakia had been the exception; all the rest, even if they started with a democratic system after the First World War, had succumbed to harsh forms of rule.⁵ It worked to the Kremlin’s advantage that these countries had yet to remove the social and economic obstacles to meritocratic progress. Reactionary army corps and wealthy quasifeudal landlords had held enormous power. Popular educational advance had been fitful. The Christian clergy lacked openness to ‘progressive’ ideas about social change. Poverty was widespread. Foreign capital investment had always been low and the Nazi occupation had brought about a further degradation in conditions. By releasing eastern Europe from the chains of this past, communist administrations could count on a degree of popular consent. Industrial nationalisation and educational expansion were widely welcomed. The possibilities of promotion at work for those who belonged to the lower social orders were eagerly greeted.

Thus there were fewer obstacles to communisation in eastern Europe than would have been the case in western Europe. Stalin was assured of finding support east of the River Elbe even though communist parties had until recently been fragile in the region. The assumption in the Kremlin was that, once the reform process got under way, communisation would develop a momentum of its own.

The communists in Yugoslavia, having won their civil war with little assistance from Moscow, shared power with no other party and encouraged the Albanian communists to behave similarly. The process developed slowly elsewhere. Monarchs were removed in Romania and Bulgaria, and in all the states of the region there was an insistence on the inclusion of communists in government; but in most cases the cabinets were coalitional. Poland was a sore spot. The Provisional Government set up by Stalin grudgingly accepted members from the London-based government-in-exile; but the communists continued to harass all its rivals. Stanisław Mikołajczyk’s Peasant Party was constantly persecuted. Elections were held elsewhere with considerable resort to malpractices which allowed communists to do better. Communists ruled Romania under Petru Groza. In Hungary Stalin faced greater difficulty. The elections of November 1945 had returned a huge anti-communist majority headed by the Smallholders’ Party. Communists, though, held many positions of power and, supported by the Soviet occupying forces, conducted arrests. Czechoslovakia was easier. President Beneš, a liberal, advocated friendly relations with the USSR, and at the 1946 elections the communists emerged as the largest single party with 38 per cent of the vote. Communist leader Klement Gottwald became Prime Minister.

Yet the events of 1947 — the Marshall Plan and the First Conference of the Cominform — changed the whole atmosphere. The Cold War broke out in its most intense form. The east European communist parties discovered how things had been transformed at the First Cominform Conference at Sklarska Poręba in Polish Silesia. Malenkov was sent as Stalin’s chief representative, and gave a tedious introductory speech proclaiming that a million copies of the official biography of Stalin had been printed since the war.⁶ Zhdanov also attended. He and Malenkov functioned as Stalin’s mouth and ears at the Conference. Zhdanov made the decisive comment on behalf of the Kremlin when he stated that ‘two camps’ existed in global politics. One was headed by the USSR, the other by the USA. Supposedly the USSR led the world’s progressive forces. The Americans had no interest in the industrial recovery of Europe; Truman aimed at nothing less than the subjugation of the continent to his country’s capitalist magnates.⁷ The Marshall Plan was a trick designed to achieve this objective for Wall Street; it was nothing less than a campaign to consolidate the global hegemony of the USA.⁸

The Conference proceeded with unpleasantness. The Yugoslavs complained that the Italians had not behaved with revolutionary firmness. They accused the Greeks of lacking a commitment to insurgency.⁹ Obviously they acted in complicity with Moscow; Stalin was insisting on fixing the blame on the Italian and Greek parties even though they had been carrying out his orders. Malenkov and Zhdanov fulfilled his instructions to the letter. In Stalin’s opinion the Marshall Plan ruined the possibility of a durable understanding with the USA, and the Americans, if they hoped to destabilise eastern Europe, would have to accept that the USSR would attempt the same in western Europe. The Cominform was not the Comintern reborn; but it embraced communist parties in countries where the threat to the desires of the Western Allies was acute: membership included not only the countries occupied by the Red Army but also Italy and France.

Stalin made the most of the available opportunities. He had demanded a daily briefing on the proceedings hundreds of miles away in Sklarska Poręba; and by sending Malenkov and Zhdanov, who were comrades but never friends and allies, he would have competing sources of information. He aimed to seize back the international initiative and disturb Washington’s equanimity. A contest between the ‘two camps’ was declared. No word of dissent issued from the mouths of participants; fear of offending the absent Stalin was paramount. Amendments to resolutions arose mainly from changes of mind amid the Soviet leadership, and these changes needed and received Stalin’s sanction. The focus was on Europe. Stalin dealt with the situation without upsetting the status quo elsewhere in the world. This was why he had curtly rejected the request of the Chinese communist leaders to attend. The purpose of the Cominform Conference was to respond to the challenge thrown down by the Marshall Plan. Having proceeded carefully in the first couple of years after the victory over Nazism, Stalin indicated to communists in western and eastern Europe that a more militant programme had to be adopted.

Although he had succeeded in his task with Yugoslav assistance, Yugoslavia troubled him within months of the First Conference. Tito would not limit himself to his country’s affairs. He badgered Stalin for aid to give to the Greek communists in their civil war against the monarchists (who were abundantly supplied and militarily reinforced by the British); he also agitated for the creation of a Balkan federal state which he evidently expected to dominate. He demanded a more rapid transition to communist policies across eastern Europe than Stalin thought desirable. Stalin decided to expel him from the Cominform and to advertise his fate as a warning to those communists in eastern Europe tempted to show similar truculence. Stalin, using Molotov and Zhdanov as his spokesmen, started the anti-Tito campaign in earnest in March 1948. Yugoslav communists were accused of adventurism, regional over-assertiveness and a deviation from Marxist–Leninist principles. Stalin also rebuked Tito for poking his nose into politics in Austria, where the Soviet Army was among the occupying powers.¹⁰

The hardened line was expressed in an increase in communist political militancy across the region. Polish elections were held to the accompaniment of intimidation and electoral fraud. Bolesław Bierut became President and the comprehensive communisation of the country proceeded. Władysław Gomułka, the Party General Secretary, was judged too resistant to Stalin’s demands for more rapid installation of Soviet-style economic and social policies and was arrested as a Titoist. The communists absorbed the other socialist parties to form the Polish United Workers’ Party. In Hungary the Smallholders’ Party leaders were arrested and in 1947 fraudulent elections brought the communists to power. The Social-Democrats were eliminated by forcing them to merge with the communists in the Hungarian Working People’s Party. In Czechoslovakia the communists manipulated the police to such an extent that the non-communists resigned from the government. Fresh elections were held and the communists, facing few surviving rivals, won an overwhelming victory. Beneš gave way to Gottwald as President in June 1948. In Bulgaria the Agrarian Union was dissolved and its leader Nikola Petkov executed. For most purposes the communists assumed monopoly of power. Georgi Dimitrov, Prime Minister from 1946, died in 1949 and his brother-in-law Valko Chervenkov took his place. After the Soviet-Yugoslav split the Albanian communist leadership under Enver Hoxha aligned itself with Moscow and executed Titoist ‘deviationists’.

All this took place against the background of Stalin’s onslaught on the Yugoslavs. Tito’s lèse-majesté was discussed at the Second Cominform Conference, which opened in Bucharest on 19 June 1948. The Yugoslavs were not present. Stalin again declined to attend, but Zhdanov and the other delegates followed his agenda to the letter. The project of a Balkan federation was dropped; Yugoslavia was to be held within its frontiers. There was no shortage of communist leaders keen to castigate the Yugoslavs. The French representative Jacques Duclos took revenge for the accusations aimed at him at the First Conference; Palmiro Togliatti from Italy, still smarting from Tito’s demand to annex Trieste to Yugoslavia, chipped in with a charge of espionage.¹¹ Tito had been transformed from communist hero to capitalist agent. The Yugoslav question dominated proceedings and Stalin was kept in daily touch with Zhdanov. The result was a vituperative rejection of Tito and his party. Yugoslav communists were admonished for anti-Soviet, counter-revolutionary, Trotskyist (and Bukharinist!), opportunistic, petit-bourgeois, sectarian, nationalist and counter-revolutionary tendencies. They were castigated at every turn. They were declared to have placed themselves outside the family of fraternal communist parties and therefore outside the Cominform.¹²

Not a squeak of opposition to Stalin and the Kremlin was audible from the other communist parties. As the Soviet propaganda machine got going, Tito was depicted as a fascist in communist clothing and as Europe’s new Hitler. The entire Yugoslav political leadership were soon called agents of foreign intelligence services.¹³ The consequences of challenging Moscow were being spelled out. An Eastern Block was formed in all but name. With the exception of Yugoslavia the countries of Europe east of the River Elbe were turned into subject entities and all were thrust into the mould of the Soviet order. Political pluralism, limited though it had been, was terminated. Economic policy too underwent change. The pace of agricultural collectivisation quickened in most countries. Across the region, indeed, communist parties increased investment in projects of heavy industry. Close commercial links were forged with the USSR. The Eastern Block aimed at autarky with economic interests as designated by Stalin being given priority. The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) was formed in January 1949 to control and co-ordinate developments. The whole region, including the Soviet-occupied German Democratic Republic, was locked into a single military, political and economic fortress. The Eastern Block was the outer empire of the USSR.

In return for obedience the subject countries were supplied with oil and other natural resources below world market prices. But in general the other immediate benefits flowed towards the Soviet Union, and Stalin and Molotov did not hide their pleasure. Although they had excoriated Churchill’s Fulton speech on the Iron Curtain, their actions fitted the description given by the former British Prime Minister. Just as the USSR had been put into quarantine before the Second World War, eastern Europe was deliberately cut off from the West in the years after 1945.

Communism was triumphant and its leaders celebrated their victory. A technical point, however, had to be clarified. No one had yet explained how the new communist states were to be fitted into a Marxist–Leninist scheme of historical stages. Stalin had insisted that they should remain formally independent countries (and he discouraged early proposals for them to be simply annexed to the USSR as had been done with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). He also wanted to stress that the USSR was the originator of the world communist movement and was at a more advanced point in its progress towards communism than the newcomers. This was the kind of message he was propagating on all fronts in Moscow. Stalin laid down that Soviet, especially Russian, achievements dwarfed those of every nation on earth. In his eyes, his military and political forces were the bringers of a superior form of civilisation to a region blighted by centuries of reactionary rule. Soviet pride, indeed arrogance, was at its zenith. The countries of the Eastern Block were meant to be fraternal states. But they were to be left in no doubt that they were younger and lesser brothers. Big Brother was the USSR.

It was also a tenet of Marxism–Leninism that revolutionary socialism usually — indeed universally, according to Lenin’s The State and Revolution — required a dictatorship of the proletariat to eradicate the vestiges of capitalism. This is what had supposedly happened in Russia with the October Revolution. Such a dictatorship could expect fanatical resistance such as had been mounted by the Whites in the Civil War. For years it had been the contention of Soviet theorists that such a result was normal. In the late 1940s, however, the situation was different. The Red Army had brought revolution to eastern Europe with its tanks and aircraft in 1944–5. The middle classes in those countries had no realistic chance of restoring capitalism, and armed uprising against Soviet armed forces would have been suicidal. The Russian historical template had not been copied.

Stalin therefore opted to designate the new communist states differently. It was the sort of task he liked in his role as the principal ideologist of world communism, and seemingly he scarcely bothered to consult his associates in the matter. He introduced a crafty nomenclature. Instead of referring to these states as proletarian dictatorships, he introduced a new term: ‘people’s democracies’. By this he contrived to suggest that their path to socialism would be smoother than had been possible in Russia. He did not have only the prevention of civil wars in mind. He was also implying that the range of popular consent reached beyond the working class to many large social groups. Peasants and the urban lower-middle class had suffered under many pre-war regimes across the region, and communist-inspired reforms had considerable appeal. Land was redistributed. Free universal education was provided. The social privileges of the upper orders were eliminated and avenues of promotion were cleared for young people who might otherwise have suffered discrimination. A term such as ‘people’s democracy’ served to stress the basic commitment of communist parties to introducing reforms which were long overdue; it was a masterstroke of ideological appeal.

Yet the term involved immense deceit. Imperfect though democracy is everywhere, it usually involves the practical provision of legal and peaceful electoral procedures. Such provision occurred nowhere in eastern Europe. Even in Czechoslovakia there was political violence before the communists achieved power. In those countries where communists continued to allow other parties to serve as junior members of governing coalitions, no fundamental derogation from the desires of the local communist leadership was permitted. There was massive electoral fraud. Although the communists had some popularity, it was always highly restricted. The accurate suspicion remained that such communists had anyway to comply with instructions issuing from the Kremlin.

As the harness of repression was imposed, Stalin strove to increase the degree of dependable compliance. He did this in line with his lurch into an anti-Jewish campaign in the USSR after he fell out with the Israeli government.¹⁴ Communist parties were constrained to select a Jew from among their midst, put him on show trial and execute him. In the Cominform countries the sordid legal processes began and no doubt many communist leaders in the region calculated that action against Jews would gain them national popularity. Yet the ultimate verdict was decided in Moscow. László Rajk in Hungary, Rudolf Slánský in Czechoslovakia and Ana Pauker in Romania: all were found guilty without the slightest evidence that they had worked for foreign intelligence agencies. All were shot. Soviet penetration of these states meant that the Soviet embassies, the MVD (which was the successor body to the NKVD) and the Soviet Army directed high politics as they pleased. Only one country remained aloof from the scheme. In Poland the pressure from Moscow was to put Gomułka on trial as a spy and shoot him. But the rest of the Polish communist leadership, having incarcerated him, refused to apply the death sentence. Not everything in eastern Europe followed precisely the path drawn for it by Joseph Stalin.

But what was Stalin up to? Certainly he had it in for Jews from 1949, and his behaviour and discourse became ever cruder.¹⁵ But Gomułka was a Pole without Jewish ancestry — and the leaders who put him in prison included Jews such as Bierut and Berman. Probably Stalin was also moving against nationalist tendencies in the communist leaderships of eastern Europe. Gomułka had famously stood out against accelerating the process of communisation in Poland and insisted that Polish national interests should be protected whenever he could. But Rajk in Hungary, Slánský in Czechoslovakia and Pauker in Romania could hardly be accused of indulging nationalism. Probably it is foolish to probe for a particular set of political sins detected by Stalin. If the results of the show trials in Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia are taken as a guide, then he surely had intended the political subjugation of eastern Europe.

The choice of victims did not much matter so long as they were leading communists. Until then the priority had been for the communist leadership in each country of the outer empire to persecute those elements of society which opposed communisation. The old elites in politics, the economy, Church and armed forces had been selected for arrest followed by forced labour or execution. The communist parties had had to infiltrate their members into all public institutions. They had to copy the basic architecture of the Soviet state and maintain close bilateral relations with Moscow. Weak in numbers in 1945, they had had to turn themselves quickly into mass parties. Their task had been to indoctrinate, recruit and govern in a situation where they knew that the bulk of their populations hated them. Yet they themselves had always been suspect to the Leader in the Kremlin. Before the end of the Second World War he thought them too doctrinaire and ordered them to try and identify themselves with the interests of their respective nations. Then as the basic communist architecture was established, his emphasis changed and he turned towards getting them to play down the national aspects of policy. Monolithism was to prevail in the Eastern Block. Total obedience would become the guiding principle, and an example had to be made — as Stalin saw things — of a few bright early stars of the Cominform.

The process was scrutinised by Stalin in the MVD reports he received from the capitals of eastern Europe. Tortures previously reserved for non-communists were applied to Rajk, Pauker and Slánský. The beatings were horrific. The victims were promised that their lives would be spared if only they confessed in open court to the charges trumped up against them. Here the expertise of the Lubyanka came into its own. Techniques developed against Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Pyatakov were applied in the dungeons and courtrooms of Budapest, Bucharest and Prague. Not all Western journalists had seen through the lies of the Great Terror of the late 1930s. The mistake was not repeated after the Second World War. The media in North America and western Europe denounced the trials. Stalin was rightly accused as the real criminal in the proceedings.

The frightened communist leaders maintained outward compliance, and no one knew whether the show trials might prove a prelude to wider purges. In the meantime the Eastern Block offered fealty to the October Revolution, the USSR and its leader Stalin. Cities were named after him. His works appeared in all the region’s languages. His policies were accorded official reverence. Yet beneath the surface the popular resentment was immense. The religious intolerance of the communist authorities caused revulsion. The refusal to divert sufficient resources to satisfy the needs of consumers annoyed entire societies. Cultural restrictions annoyed the intelligentsia. No communist government offered the realistic prospect of change and all of them were firmly regarded as Soviet puppet ensembles. Countries in western Europe displayed intermittent irritation at the USA’s hegemony; but the anger at the USSR’s rule was wider and deeper in eastern Europe. Without the Soviet military occupation and the penetration by the MVD, no communist regime would have endured more than a few days by the early 1950s. Stalin had acquired the regional buffer zone he craved, but only at the price of turning those countries into a region of constant repressed hostility to his purposes. His political victory in 1945–8 was bound in the end to prove a Pyrrhic one.

48. STALINIST RULERSHIP

Putting aside his Stavka work in 1945, Stalin had picked up the routines of his social life. His options had been narrowed by his own actions. In the mid-1930s he had turned for company to the extended families of the Alliluevs and Svanidzes. But then he had killed or arrested several of them, and the survivors were in a state of psychological shock not conducive to a dinner-party atmosphere.

The Germans had shot Yakov. Vasili was an over-promoted wastrel who irritated fellow officers in the Soviet Air Force and whose drunken parties earned ostracism from his father. Svetlana brought little joy. After breaking with Kapler she set out to inveigle Beria’s son Sergo into marriage — an unlikely venture since Sergo was already married. Thwarted, she instead married Grigori Morozov against Stalin’s wishes in 1943. The marriage was stormy and a divorce was agreed in spring 1947. That summer Stalin invited her to spend some weeks with him at Kholodnaya Rechka by the Black Sea.¹ He had a dacha built for her down the steep slope from his own much bigger dacha.² Although this was a pleasant gesture, they were not going to share an abode: they were edgy in each other’s company. Soon she turned her attentions to Zhdanov’s son Yuri, and the couple married in 1949. Stalin showed little enthusiasm even for this unexceptionable match and declined to attend the ceremony; and although he had Svetlana’s children to the dacha, his interest in them was fleeting. Svetlana and Yuri quickly fell out and separated. She exasperated Stalin. Individuals whom he wanted to integrate in his emotional world had to comply with his expectations or be cast from his affections.

Stalin remained a needy person: solitude did not suit him. He coped by joking with his dacha bodyguards. He teased his bodyguard chief Vlasik and his chief aide Poskrëbyshev. He chatted with his housekeeper Valentina Istomina; and even if the rumours of her having been his mistress remain unproven, he derived comfort from her companionship.

Yet these contacts did not make him a happy man, and his thoughts reverted to earlier periods in his life. In 1947 he wrote to a certain V. G. Solomin whom he had known in Turukhansk District in the First World War:³

On vacation at Kholodnaya Rechka in autumn 1948, he got downright nostalgic and ordered arrangements to be made to enable his Gori schoolmates to stay with him. Peter Kapanadze, M. Titvinidze and Mikhail Dzeradze were invited. There was initial embarrassment when they arrived. Kapanadze broke the ice by expressing his condolence about the death of that ‘poor boy’, Stalin’s son Yakov. Stalin replied that he was but one parent among millions who had lost a relative. Kapanadze, who had business to attend to, left after a few days. There was much singing on subsequent evenings but Titvinidze and Dzeradze got fidgety before a week was up. Stalin asked whether they were bored. Titvinidze replied that they knew he had much work to do. Stalin took the hint. Soon they were packing their bags and, after a warm farewell, were driven home to Georgia.⁴ He recognised that the past could not be restored by artificial means, and he never saw his friends again.

His Politburo subordinates were keener guests by the Black Sea or at the Blizhnyaya dacha. His dinner parties were now nearly always allmale affairs. For the politicians, an invitation signified continued favour and prolonged life. Hours of eating and drinking would usually be followed by a film-show. Stalin also still liked to sing those Church trios with Molotov and Voroshilov — accompanied by Zhdanov at the pianoforte — even though his voice had lost its strength and accuracy.⁵ Otherwise, though, the dinners were raucous. As previously, he tried to get his guests hopelessly pickled. Endless toasts would be given to distinguished visitors, and Stalin, despite his demurrals, liked to receive praise.

Yet the soft potency of hospitality at the dachas could harden in an instant. As his political guests knew all too well, the Boss used occasions of hospitality to loosen tongues. Many needed little encouragement. Pravda editor Leonid Ilichëv never forgot the last occasion he went to Blizhnyaya. Stalin had called him at midnight, inviting him over to discuss a forthcoming article. There he came upon Beria, Malenkov and Molotov relaxing with the Leader. After an hour’s work all moved to a lavishly prepared dinner table. Ilichëv was poured a glass of Georgian wine while Beria helped himself to a brandy and proposed a toast to Stalin. Prudently, because he had not yet eaten, Ilichëv swigged only half the glass and picked up a bite to eat. But Beria had spotted a breach of etiquette: ‘You should drain your glass when drinking to comrade Stalin.’ When Ilichëv muttered his excuse, Beria exclaimed in a tragic tone: ‘Comrade Stalin, will you permit me to drink your health by draining his glass?’ Stalin’s eyes glistened derisively but he said nothing. Ilichëv gripped his glass tight. Beria tried to snatch it off him shouting: ‘I wish to drink to comrade Stalin!’ But Ilichëv held on to the glass and drank its contents.

Stalin acidulously announced that the next toast should be to Beria and asked why Ilichëv appeared reluctant to join in. The Pravda editor was speechless with fear. ‘Well, then, comrade Ilichëv,’ ventured the teasing Stalin, ‘I’ll drain your little glass and drink to our much respected friend Lavrenti.’ Ilichëv could not afford to stay out of the toasting round and, after getting plastered, became the butt of everyone’s ridicule. As light dawned, Malenkov helped him into his coat and his waiting car.

Stalin asked the Politburo members what they thought of Ilichëv as an editor. He was using tomfoolery to make a professional assessment. Beria opined that Ilichëv talked too freely; Malenkov added that a ‘more solid’ kind of person was needed. After sobering up, the editor found he had been sacked.⁶ Yet he never blamed Stalin; he failed entirely to understand that it was by this social device that Stalin scrutinised and demeaned his minions. Those closer to Stalin were more aware of what was going on. So long as he kept the Politburo divided, his dominance was secure. Jealousy, misunderstanding and dispute were in the despot’s regular tool-kit. Politburo members understood all this but could do nothing about it short of assassinating him. If ever such a thought crossed the mind of his subordinates, they swiftly dismissed it. The gamble would have been altogether too risky because he was guarded by men personally devoted to him. Even if a group of the politicians had got together in a conspiracy, there was always the probability that the others would gang up against them. Arrest would have been certain.

Stalin’s actions remained brutal regardless of attempts to placate him — and he systematically undermined the position of those who had authority and prominence after the war.⁷ His methods were characteristically devious. Molotov’s wife Polina Zhemchuzhina was arrested in 1949. Zhemchuzhina was Jewish and Stalin objected to the warmth of her welcome for Israeli envoy Golda Meir in Moscow.⁸ Molotov abstained in the Politburo vote on her expulsion from the party, but then apologised to Stalin:

Molotov was not the only leader deprived of his marital partner. Yelena Kalinina and Tamara Khazan — wife of Andrei Andreev — had long been in labour camps (although Kalinina was released in time for her husband’s death).¹⁰

Soviet politicians had to become masters of ingratiation. After a contretemps with Stalin in December 1945, Molotov assured him: ‘I shall try by my deeds to become worthy of your trust, a trust in which every honourable Bolshevik sees not only personal trust but the party’s trust which is dearer to me than my life.’ His ‘crude, opportunistic mistake’ had consisted in allowing excerpts from Churchill’s speeches to be reproduced in Moscow.¹¹ The matter was hardly of great importance but Stalin had refused to see it that way. ‘None of us’, he barked by telegram from Abkhazia, ‘has the right to undertake a unilateral disposition involving alteration of our course of policy. Yet Molotov has arrogated that right to himself. Why and on what grounds? Is it not because such tricks enter his plan of work?’¹² Mikoyan too had to humble himself when Stalin was angered by decisions on grain procurement:¹³

Some father! Some sons! The hands of Molotov and Mikoyan were steeped in the blood of the victims of Soviet state policies, and yet they too had to grovel. They knew they had to approach Stalin as if he were the USSR’s stern but fair patriarch — and just possibly they might survive.

Stalin’s paternal functions involved regular humiliation, and he was inventive in going about this. Molotov asked the Polish communist leader Jakub Berman for a waltz at one of Stalin’s soirées. This infringement of manly convention pleased and suited Stalin. Molotov led the fumbling Berman while Stalin presided at the gramophone. Berman was to put a positive gloss on the episode: the waltz with Molotov had been a chance not to whisper sweet nothings to the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs but to mumble ‘things that couldn’t be said out loud’.¹⁴ He contrived to forget how he and Molotov had been degraded for Stalin’s delight.

The Leader’s dominion involved chronometric regulation. Lunch was taken in the late afternoon around four or five o’clock and dinner was arranged for no earlier than nine o’clock. Stalin lived like this, and the entire ruling group had to adjust its collective body-clock to his habits.¹⁵ Kaganovich aped him to the minute.¹⁶ Molotov coped by taking little naps in daytime; such was his self-control that he was known to announce to his aides: ‘I’m now going to take a rest in the next room for thirteen minutes.’ He got up from the divan like an automaton and returned precisely thirteen minutes later.¹⁷ All knew that the Leader worked from the early evening onwards; everyone in the upper strata of the Soviet elite had to do the same — and their families had to put up with this as the price to be paid for sustaining life and privilege. With the communisation of eastern Europe the schedule of the working day changed there too. Throughout the USSR and across to Berlin, Tirana and Sofia the leading figures in party and government dared not stray from the proximity of the phone. Stalin could ring at any time of the night through to the early hours of the morning.¹⁸

As Stalin’s vacations in the south became longer, he resorted frequently to telegrams. He could not control the entire machinery of state in detail. This had long been obvious to him. ‘I can’t know everything,’ he said to Ivan Kovalëv, Minister of Communications after the Second World War. ‘I pay attention to disagreements and to objections, and I work out why they’ve arisen and what they are about.’¹⁹ Stalin explained that his subordinates constantly kept things from him and that they always concocted a compromise behind the scenes before they reported to him. To him this was tantamount to conspiracy. Only Voznesenski stood out against such practices — and Stalin admired him for this. Stalin hated the ‘insincerity’ of other Politburo members. He might not detect particular cases of trickery but he knew they could trick him, and he functioned on the assumption that they were not to be trusted. The result was that Stalin, depleted in energy, looked for discrepancies between the accounts of one leader and another.²⁰ Any disagreement was likely to lie across fault-lines in policy. Stalin had hit upon an economical way of penetrating the secrets of what was being done in the corridors of the Kremlin.

Information also came to him by secret channels. The ‘organs’ — known as MGB from March 1946 and kept separate from the MVD — regularly reported on their eavesdropping of conversations among the Soviet leaders. Other Politburo members, he knew, were personally ambitious; and since they had repressed millions on his orders, he assumed they could form a violent conspiracy against him. Throughout the war with Germany he had ordered listening devices to be installed in the apartments of military personnel. The practice was applied to a growing list of civilian politicians. Even Molotov and Mikoyan were being bugged by 1950.²¹

Another of his modalities was to cultivate jealousy among his subordinates. There was constant bickering, and Stalin alone was allowed to arbitrate. He seldom allowed the highest political leaders to stay in a particular post for long. Nothing was left settled in the Kremlin: Stalin saw that job insecurity among his potential successors aided his ability to dominate them. The Moscow political carousel flung off some individuals from time to time, and the survivors regularly had to dismount and move from one seat to another. This was not enough by itself. Stalin’s ill health barred him from undertaking the detailed supreme supervision he had exercised in the 1930s and during the Second World War. He needed a dependable individual to act as his eyes and ears in the leadership just as Lenin had turned to him for help in April 1922. Stalin operated with cunning. At any given time after 1945 he had a political favourite, and he sometimes hinted that the favourite was his chosen successor. But such favour was never formally bestowed, and Stalin raised up individuals only to hurl them down later. No one could grasp the levers of power in such a fashion as to acquire the capacity to supplant Stalin.

There were many levers. In 1946 the Council of Ministers (as Sovnarkom was redesignated in the same year) had forty-eight ministries and committees, each being responsible for a large sector of state functions.²² Stalin ceased chairing it. Instead he increased the emphasis on ‘curatorship’. This was a system whereby every leading associate of Stalin was assigned responsibility for a group of institutions.²³ Stalin, while wanting flux and vagueness as an ultimate safeguard of his rule, needed to assure himself that the state complied with his declared intentions. Curators were his solution. They met him frequently and never knew when he might haul them over the coals because one of their institutions had given him grounds for disquiet. Each group of institutions was the object of rivalry. Politburo members wanted to have as many as possible; this was a token of Stalin’s approval as well as a grant of real power. Reduction of the number signalled that a particular associate had fallen under the shadow of disapprobation — or even of the Leader’s lethal suspicion. His associates were under constant, intense pressure. Always they feared that some silly slip by one of their own subordinates might have adverse consequences for themselves. This could happen at any time because the Leader cultivated jealousies among all of them.

He also harangued them into adopting his own ferocious style of leadership: at a Party Central Committee plenum in March 1946 he declared: ‘A People’s Commissar must be a wild animal; he must work and take direct responsibility for work.’²⁴ Rulership as Stalin recommended it to People’s Commissars and their curators was nothing like the model of bureaucratic life described by sociologists since Max Weber and Roberto Michels. Even in his last years, when the Soviet order was stabilised and in many ways petrified, it retained a militant and dynamic quality.

Politics were a bear-pit. Politburo members could bite and claw each other as brutally as they liked so long as they produced the outcome demanded by Stalin. Only in Stalin’s presence were they constrained to moderate their behaviour. The Politburo had ceased to convene in the war and the pre-war tradition was not resumed.²⁵ Stalin continued to consult other leaders by informal methods. Always he liked to have leading figures in the Politburo write, telegram or telephone their assent to his preferences into policy. The Orgburo and the Secretariat — as well as the Council of Ministers and its Presidium — deliberated in his absence. The Party Congress, which had supreme formal authority over all party bodies, was not called until 1952. Stalin expected to rule through unofficial channels; he knew that disruption of institutional regularity helped to prolong his personal despotism. He could intervene with an order at his whim. He deliberately inflicted a contradictory pattern of work on his subordinates. They, unlike him, had to observe administrative procedures punctiliously. At the same time they had to obtain practical results regardless of the rulebook. The pressure was unremitting. This was the way he liked things, and the other leaders dared make no objection.

The fact that Stalin was often away from Moscow led many contemporaries (and subsequent commentators) to surmise that he was losing his grip on power. This was a misperception. On the large questions of the international, political and economic agenda there was little that escaped his adjudication; and Kremlin politicians were altogether too fearful of him to try to trick him. The framework of rulership at the centre and in the provinces also continued to exercise his attention. At the end of the war four bodies had immense importance. These were the government, the party, the security police and the army. Stalin needed all of them. He also required a situation in which no institution became so dominant as to threaten his position. The most obvious menace after the Second World War was the Red Army, and the country’s military hero Georgi Zhukov immediately came under his suspicion.

No sooner had Zhukov led the victory parade on Red Square and completed Allied military negotiations with Eisenhower and Montgomery in Berlin than he was pulled out of the limelight. Stalin had plenty of compromising material against him. The security agencies reported to the Kremlin that Zhukov had stolen a trainload of loot from Germany. The list was enormous, including 3,420 silks, 323 furs, 60 gilt-framed pictures, 29 bronze statues and a grand piano.²⁶ This was established custom in the Red occupying forces. Practically every commander could have been arraigned on similar charges. Stalin played with the idea of a trial but in June 1946 limited himself to relegating the victor of Kursk and Berlin to the Odessa Military District (from which he was in turn dismissed in February 1947). Pravda steadily ceased to give prominence to the names of marshals. The police were empowered to tighten surveillance over the officer corps. Undeniably the Red Army (redesignated the Soviet Army in 1946) remained vital to the tasks of maintaining political control in the USSR and eastern Europe; it was also the recipient of budgetary largesse as Gosplan increasingly skewed central economic planning in favour of military expenditure. Yet Stalin remained eager to hold the armed forces under his civilian control.

The security agencies too came under suspicion. Here Stalin’s method was different. Beria in peacetime, unlike Zhukov, was too useful to discard. Yet it suited Stalin to replace him in the leadership of the police. Beria knew too much and had too many clients whom he had appointed to office. Stalin therefore put Beria in charge of the Soviet atom-bomb project and introduced younger men to the Ministry of State Security (MGB) and to the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). The appointee to the MVD in December 1945 was Sergei Kruglov, and Alexei Kuznetsov was given oversight over security matters on the Politburo’s behalf; Viktor Abakumov became head of the MGB in May 1946. Although continuity of administrative leadership was desirable in theory, Stalin’s higher demand was his inviolable personal power. A police chief who settled into office could pose an acute danger to him, especially since the MGB had uniformed forces which could be deployed in the normal course of events. Stalin also retained his own parallel security agency in the form of the Special Department. He relied heavily on Poskrëbyshev to keep him apprised of anything important to his interests. He also ensured that his bodyguard chief Vlasik should be beholden to himself and to no one else. This was a police state where the ruler held his police in permanent mistrust.

Yet his simultaneous reliance on the MGB and MVD was intense. Without their operational efficiency it would have been difficult to reduce the standing of the Soviet Army leadership. The Soviet budget continued to allocate massive resources to the security agencies. The Gulag still produced a crucial proportion of the country’s diamonds, gold and timber, and the uranium mines were developed after 1945 with convict labour. Indeed Stalin’s reliance on the security agencies grew as he reinforced policies which frustrated the hopes of most citizens for political and economic relaxation. Coercion of society was hugely important.

Yet not even Stalin projected a future for the USSR when the MGB and MVD would be the effective government. The Council of Ministers retained that function. The increasing complexity of the economy required specialist knowledge lacking in the security agencies. The Council of Ministers also sought to free itself from excessive tutelage by party bodies: a technocratic imperative was pursued by several leading political figures. This was an old discussion that had exercised Stalin’s mind throughout the 1930s. As previously, he moved between two solutions. One was to give way to the ministerial lobby and put a stop to the party’s interference. This was the orientation espoused especially by Georgi Malenkov. The other solution was to extend and strengthen the powers of the party, if not to the pitch of the late 1920s then at least to the detriment of the Council of Ministers in the 1940s. Among the advocates of this orientation was Andrei Zhdanov. Stalin in the early years after the Second World War leaned positively in the direction of Zhdanov. But then Zhdanov fell into disfavour, and he began to give backing to Malenkov.²⁷

The arguments, from a structural viewpoint, were finely poised. Zhdanov and his friends could indicate that the Council of Ministers, left to itself, could not guarantee Stalinist ideological rectitude. Without this, the October Revolution was undermined and the rationale of the USSR’s existence was ruined. The Soviet Union could not survive on technocratic impulses alone. Yet the other side of the debate had an equally strong case. The USSR functioned in a world of intense military and economic competition. If party doctrinaires held the whip hand over ministerial specialists, the country’s capacity to match the USA and its capitalist allies would be reduced. Pettifogging tutelage by the party would tie one of the Soviet Union’s hands behind its back in a contest which placed the West at an advantage.

Stalin did not need to be persuaded that the USSR had to become more competitive or that ideological indoctrination and political control were important. His state could do without neither government nor party; and even when he gave preference to one of them over the other, he omitted to make the choice a definitive one. The institutional tension worked to his personal advantage. By locking the two bodies in rivalry, he strengthened his position as arbiter. But this in turn meant that he had to settle for a lower level of administrative efficiency that he would otherwise have liked. He started from the premise that each institution pursued its interests at the expense of others. Persistent rivalries led to systematic obstruction. The tangled competences of government, party and police produce a thicket of bureaucratic paperwork which slowed down the processes of deliberation and implementation. Dynamism was introduced when Stalin himself gave a direct order or when he allowed an influential group of subordinates to pursue a desired initiative. But Stalin knew he could not know everything. The network of central institutional bodies worked well to maintain his despotism; it was less effective in facilitating flexible, efficient rulership. Stalin paid a price for his despotism.

49. POLICIES AND PURGES

Stalin did not confine his Kremlin political activity to manipulating the existing central structures and playing the leading politicians off against each other. There had to be constant deliberation on policies in the dangerous post-war years. The external and internal situation was always in flux and Stalin could not cope without consulting his fellow leaders. He had to accept that limits existed to what he could learn about the world by his solitary efforts. Nor could he safely rely exclusively on his own judgement. It was pragmatic to sanction a degree of diversity of opinion among his subordinates before fixing policy. Disagreements among the leaders were not only inevitable: they were also desirable. There was no secret about this; Politburo members understood how they were being manipulated. But they also saw that if they failed to take a position when affairs were under discussion, Stalin might decide that they were no longer of any use to him. At the same time they had to avoid saying anything which would annoy him. Short of assassinating him, they remained at his mercy — and his scrupulous attention to the details of his personal security made it highly unlikely that an attempt on his life would be successful.

Stalin’s leading associates were in any case simultaneously occupied with the discharge of their institutional duties. Immense responsibility fell to each of them and their power and privileges were at least some compensation for the subjugated condition of their work. They were also motivated by patriotic zeal and, in some cases, ideological commitment. They had operated under Stalin’s control for years. It is hardly a surprise that he continued dominating and exploiting them just as they did their own subordinates.

And so Stalin frequently shuffled the pack of the leadership as individuals won or lost his trust in the battles he permitted over policy. One leader he demoted soon after the war was Vyacheslav Molotov. Alongside Kaganovich and Mikoyan, Molotov was his longest-serving subordinate. Initially all seemed well. When Stalin went south on vacation in October 1945, he left the foursome of Molotov, Beria, Mikoyan and Malenkov in charge of the Kremlin.¹ But almost certainly he was looking for a pretext to attack Molotov, and the incident over the publication of excerpts of Churchill’s speeches gave him what he wanted. Stalin may have resented Molotov’s wartime fame as well as his popularity as an ethnic Russian. The British press must have made the situation still worse by speculating that Molotov was flexing his muscles to assume power.² The beneficiaries of the demise of Molotov were Malenkov and Beria, who in March 1946 were promoted — at a rare Party Central Committee plenum — to full membership of the Politburo, and Malenkov’s name came after Stalin’s in the composition of the Orgburo and Secretariat.³ Molotov was not sacked as Minister of External Affairs until March 1949 but his time as Stalin’s deputy had already ceased.

Yet although Stalin was resentful and suspicious, even he did not yet wish to get rid entirely of Molotov. When Trygve Lie, Secretary-General of the United Nations Organisation, visited Stalin in Moscow in May 1950, Stalin recalled Molotov to take an active part in the discussions.⁴ Molotov’s expertise was as yet too useful to discard. His formal status had been undermined but his actual influence, despite having been reduced, was still far from negligible. He remained a Politburo member and, more importantly, a regular dinner guest at Stalin’s dacha. Stalin was playing a long game.

For a counterweight to Malenkov’s new authority he turned to Andrei Zhdanov, who was put in charge of the Propaganda Administration in the Party Secretariat in April 1946. Zhdanov’s position was consolidated by the simultaneous appointment of Alexei Kuznetsov, who worked alongside him in Leningrad, to head the Secretariat’s Cadres Administration. Malenkov knew he would need to look over his own shoulder.⁵ Indeed scarcely had he risen than he was cast down. In May 1946 the Politburo sacked him from the Party Secretariat. Stalin blamed him for failing to improve the quality of aircraft production. N. S. Patolichev took his place.⁶ Malenkov’s time in the sun had been short; like Molotov, however, he was not entirely excluded from Kremlin activity (at least after his return from an assignment in the Soviet republics of central Asia). As yet the juggling of the personnel pack after the war did not involve much beyond the obvious loss of prestige and influence. Malenkov was not arrested but his clients in party and government were removed from posts and often replaced by individuals associated with Zhdanov at the time when he had worked in Leningrad. Zhdanov’s star was in the ascendant.

Exactly why Stalin had suddenly changed his preferences remains mysterious. It may be that he was genuinely annoyed by the revelations of sloppy standards in the aircraft-production industry. Perhaps, however, he was looking for any pretext whatever to keep the entire Politburo on its toes — and there was no member of the Politburo who eventually failed to incur his disapproval. Possibly Stalin’s fondness for Zhdanov also played a part; Molotov recalled: ‘Stalin loved Zhdanov more than all the rest.’⁷ With Zhdanov at his right arm, Stalin moved against Mikoyan. This was not their first contretemps in recent years. In 1944 Stalin had ‘crudely’ rejected Mikoyan’s proposal to give grain seeds for winter sowing to the restored collective farms of Ukraine: he accused Mikoyan of acting in ‘an anti-state fashion’.⁸ In December 1946 this turned into permanent hostility on Stalin’s part when he accused him of supporting moves to yield to the USA’s conditions for increased mutual trade.⁹

No one was safe. The Party Central Committee at Stalin’s request promoted Voznesenski, a Leningrader, to the Politburo in February 1947. But Stalin at the same time elevated Nikolai Bulganin to membership: he did not want a Leningrad group to enjoy unrivalled power at the centre. Indeed he never let a new balance rest for long. Agitation of the scales was a feature of his rule, and he was most unlikely to keep Zhdanov as his permanent favourite. Molotov and Mikoyan, however, faded from view. Invited to eat with Stalin in Myussery in 1948, they were hurt by a little scene involving Poskrëbyshev. In the middle of the meal, Poskrëbyshev suddenly turned to Stalin and said: ‘Comrade Stalin, while you’ve been on vacation down here in the south, Molotov and Mikoyan in Moscow have been organising a plot against you.’¹⁰ The two accused understood that Stalin had stage-managed the scene; and when they protested their innocence, Stalin accepted their protestations. But they never came back into his favour. According to Mikoyan, Stalin’s ‘capriciousness’ became evident only from the last years of the war. Mikoyan fooled himself. He failed to recall that Stalin in power had always revelled in arbitrary methods. The difference was that Mikoyan, after a career of enjoying Stalin’s favour, had only recently become a victim of them.

If Mikoyan had a point, it was that Stalin from the last years of the war began to act more oddly than ever towards his entourage in social surroundings. They had been fearful of him before 1941. They had never been able to predict whether they might be picked on by him and arrested. But as victory in the war approached and Stalin resumed convivial behaviour, he enjoyed toying with their feelings. They thought this a sign of deterioration rather than the gradual extension of an existing trend. They were political survivors but unsophisticated psychologists despite their expertise in handling his moods over several decades.

Kremlin politics began to favour Malenkov and Beria when, in August 1948, Zhdanov died after lengthy treatment in a clinic. Plagued by alcoholism and cardiac disease, he had been poorly for years. But a rumour spread that his doctors had killed him. One of the clinic’s medical officers, Lidia Timashuk, filed complaints about the shoddy treatment he had received. Although Stalin’s office received the dossier on Zhdanov, no action followed — he may not in fact have scrutinised it at the time. He had anyway ceased to show favour towards Zhdanov for some months, and now he empowered Malenkov and Beria to follow up his death with an investigation of the political situation in Leningrad. Malenkov, a baby-faced and overweight apparatchik with a terrifying record in the Great Terror, claimed to find evidence of a conspiracy aimed at Stalin and the Kremlin. Stalin was sufficiently convinced that the Leningraders had been insubordinate in policy to sanction a massive political purge throughout the city’s party and government leadership. Executions followed in 1950. Malenkov returned to the Kremlin as Stalin’s favourite for the next few years.

Not all Leningrad politicians had associated themselves with Zhdanov’s quest for a widening of the party’s political functions. But many had done so, and the city had a reputation for harbouring those who retained a commitment to the party’s importance, to ideology and to the curbing of technocratic tendencies in the vast apparatus of the Council of Ministers.¹¹ Lined up against Zhdanov had been Malenkov and Beria, who advocated greater latitude for the ministries to take up the task of economic regeneration. In the mandatory opaque language they stressed a preference for putting specialists in charge of affairs. Expertise rather than ideology should predominate. The division between the two sides was not entirely clear-cut. Beria and Malenkov did not advocate the party’s removal from the country’s administration. Both were also associated with the organs of repression even though Beria ceased being the leader of the security organs from 1945. To some extent their opinions reflected the interests of the institutions they currently headed — and this had been true also for Zhdanov. But a dispute of intrinsic importance had divided them. Stalin would have to resolve it somehow.

The Leningrad Affair was the first blood-purge of the communist political elite since 1938. The deportations, arrests and executions after the Second World War had been aimed at specific social categories, especially leading figures in public and economic life in the newly annexed Baltic states. Stalin had also put returning prisoners-of-war to forced labour in the camps of the Gulag. But the incarceration of the Leningraders was different because the victims belonged to the highest echelons of officialdom in the USSR. This time he did not bother with show trials. Hundreds of party and government functionaries were thrown into prison and shot. Among them were Politburo member Nikolai Voznesenski, Central Committee Secretary Alexei Kuznetsov, RSFSR Prime Minister Mikhail Rodionov and Leningrad Party First Secretary Pëtr Popkov.

Although Stalin did not disclose his motives, those of Malenkov and Beria may easily be guessed. They had always resented Zhdanov’s authority and his political clientele in Leningrad. Soviet public life was a snake pit and Malenkov and Beria were two of its anacondas. Their opportunity to suffocate Zhdanov’s associates had arrived. But why did Stalin agree? Probably he had come to resent the way that Voznesenski had spoken up against him in wartime; Voznesenski was also the only Politburo member to write a best-selling book after the war. It may well be that his growing status as a politician irritated Stalin just as Zhukov had annoyed him as a commander. At any rate when Voznesenski was discovered to have mislaid important Gosplan data, there was a chance for Malenkov, who had always hated him personally,¹² to accuse him of irresponsible and even traitorous behaviour.¹³ Voznesenski was also found to have withheld information on discrepancies between state economic plans and the real economic situation. Straight-talking Voznesenski was shown to be a deceiver. Although everyone in the political leadership was deceitful, Voznesenski had had the ill luck to be discovered. To Stalin’s mind, a Politburo member could commit no fouler offence than fail to be honest with him.

Others in Leningrad had also offended Stalin. The leadership in Leningrad, ‘hero-city’ in the Great Patriotic War, had cultivated local patriotism. Capital of the Russian Empire since the reign of Peter the Great, it remained a rival to Moscow after the transfer of the seat of government to Moscow in March 1918. Leningrad’s inhabitants thought they had survived the German onslaught more by their own determination than by assistance from the Kremlin. The city was starting to seem like Russia’s capital in a Soviet multinational state — the USSR — based in Moscow.

The leadership of party and government in the city had begun to give signs of overstepping the limits Stalin had approved.¹⁴ Much as he liked to incorporate the national pride of Russians in doctrine and policy, he never lost his concern about the possible growth of nationalism among them. The Leningrad political elite failed to comprehend the rules of the situation. Kuznetsov had organised a retail fair in Leningrad for all parts of the RSFSR without the Kremlin’s permission and Rodionov had called for a special ‘Bureau for the RSFSR’.¹⁵ Voznesenski had not worked in Leningrad since before the war; but Stalin sensed a nationalist streak in him and told Mikoyan: ‘For him not only the Georgians and Armenians but even the Ukrainians aren’t real people.’¹⁶ Furthermore, the Leningraders, including Zhdanov, had enthused about the Yugoslavs after the Second World War. Tito and the Yugoslavs advocated a more radical communisation of eastern Europe.¹⁷ Stalin had not demurred at the time; but when he and Tito fell out, Zhdanov’s known inclination — even if it had had Stalin’s endorsement at the time — may have made him suspect that the USSR’s ‘second capital’ was a nest of treachery. Voznesenski had been highly favoured in wartime, and Kuznetsov in 1948 had even been mentioned by Stalin as his possible successor.¹⁸

Stalin was not really threatened by them. No Leningrad leader was demonstrably eager to promote a Russian nationalist cause. The only serious source of worry was that they sought to dig autonomous foundations for the RSFSR within the USSR. But always extremely wary, Stalin left nothing to chance. The Leningraders were arrested, interrogated and shot. They had not been a cohesive group with a uniform and agreed programme; and some of them — notably Politburo member and Gosplan Chairman Voznesenski — had interests which conflicted with Zhdanov’s emphasis on the virtues of the party. But enough of them were in agreement in the political discussions after the war for them to be regarded as a potential orientation inside the supreme ruling coterie.¹⁹

The Leningrad Affair did not halt dispute about policy. Certainly the position of the ministerial apparatus was consolidated to the detriment of the party, and trained specialists in economic and social sectors of public life — and indeed in political ones — were left undisturbed by party and police. Having toyed with measures to raise the popular standard of living, Stalin had reverted to older priorities. The Cold War imposed colossal budgetary strains on the already damaged Soviet economy. Dispositions were made to maximise heavy-industrial production and resources were devoted in abundance to the armed forces and the armaments factories as well as to the development of nuclear weapons. Xenophobic statements were issued about world affairs; little remained of the restraints characteristic of the Grand Alliance. The wartime cultural relaxation was revoked and persecution of the creative intelligentsia was resumed. Things Russian attracted extravagant praise. Marxism–Leninism in its peculiar Stalinist variant was at the centre of the propaganda of press, radio and schooling. Punitive procedures were tightened; prisoners released at the end of their sentences in the Gulag were rearrested and either sent back to camps or transferred to special settlements.

Stalin liked the world to believe that debate about primary aspects of policy had ceased to be necessary and that a popular consensus existed in the USSR. Thus any reconsideration of the ‘line of the day’ was a waste of time at best and a heresy and danger to state interests at worst. Supposedly Stalin’s ideas were exactly those of the party and of the working class. Nevertheless some members of his entourage felt that several sectors of public life required reform. Malenkov believed that light-industrial production should be prioritised notwithstanding the deterioration in relations between the USA and the USSR. Beria agreed (and after Stalin’s death he co-operated with Malenkov in seeking to foster reconciliation between the former military allies). Probably Malenkov and Beria also concurred that the breach with Yugoslavia had been undesirable. Malenkov, though, was less eager than Khrushchëv to acknowledge the existence of an agricultural emergency in the USSR. He also declined to admit the dangers, identified by Beria, which were posed by the exacerbation of national feelings among the non-Russian peoples. The supreme leadership was riddled by suppressed disputes along a range of current policies.

It was one thing for Stalin to develop an idiosyncratic structure for the Soviet political leadership and entirely another to keep it standing. By playing with the fate of his subordinates, he risked destabilising the whole state order, as had happened in 1937–8. The institutions controlling society, the economy and culture needed to maintain their authority. Society was cowed but it was capable of bursting into rebellion: the history of popular revolts in the Russian Empire provided a warning against official complacency. This was not Stalin’s sole calculation. He knew that, if he removed his subordinates in one great purge, he would bring himself into disrepute. He had picked all of them and his judgement would be put under question. Furthermore, Stalin also had to be wary of the reaction of his intended victims. If he made them feel frightened about his intentions, they might attempt a coup. He therefore moved against individuals rather than the whole group. Stalin was not omnipotent. He needed to act with caution, moving against his subordinates in stages.

There abides an image of Stalin as ruler which shows him as a despot unprecedented in history. More than Louis XIV, he could accurately claim: ‘L’État, c’est moi.’ The Great Terror had resulted in total victory. The lasting institution of supreme power and authority — the party — was conquered by his bloody methods and subsequently he could do more or less what he pleased. All institutions were in permanent contest with each other at a level vastly lower than Stalin’s imperial throne. Institutions certainly mattered. But they received their orders from the celestial heights without being able to amend the contents. They functioned as Stalin’s administrative conveyor belts, their task being to carry out whatever errands he had set for each particular day. The leaders of institutions were in post solely at his whim, and they discharged their duties to the letter of his expressed will. Institutions and leaders were therefore mere extensions of Stalin’s declared wishes and intimations. Politics in any generally accepted sense had ceased. An administrative behemoth ran the USSR whose master was the pockmarked little psychopath. According to such imagery, Stalin was totalitarianism in human form.

Central bodies were not the only problem. Each institution had its internal discrepancies. The centre vied with its local adjuncts. Leaders in Moscow tried to increase their authority by introducing their personal supporters to posts at lower levels. Patronage was normalised as a political phenomenon. Stalin could weaken its effect by placing rivals in particular institutions; but he could not eliminate it entirely, and since the end of the Great Terror had not made it his business to try. He could also insert his own chosen appointees into the provincial tiers. Yet for all this a great deal of energy was necessary. Stalin had possessed it in the 1930s even if he made choices based more on guesswork than on acquaintance with functionaries — he had ceased to meet provincial delegations as a matter of course in the late 1920s. In fact he rarely intervened in the huge process of non-central appointments after 1945. He was too old and exhausted and other things were on his mind: grand foreign and economic policy, the Korean War, the world communist movement and his political supremacy.

Stalinist governance stayed as contradictory as ever. Enormous power accrued to Stalin and his subordinates in the Politburo, and only saints or fools criticised the right to rule or the contents of their policies. Elections were a sham. Consultation of popular opinion never occurred. The obligation of Soviet citizens was to listen to orders and accede to doctrines. Hierarchical command had become a normal and prime aspect of governance and anyone challenging this development of the Soviet order — and even many who did not dare to challenge it — was certain to end up against a wall or in a labour camp. The immense, active power of the state was irresistible and few made the attempt to resist. Just a handful of brave Russian students got together in universities and discussed schemes for a reversion of ideology and practice to true Leninism. Religious dissenters too continued to hold secret meetings. Some intellectuals went on writing despite there being no prospect of publication. The armed partisan groups in Ukraine and the Baltic states, though diminished, had not yet been eliminated. But across the face of the USSR the forces of resistance to Stalinism were weak. On the back of that mighty state sat Joseph Stalin — Soso to his ageing school friends, Joseph to the Alliluevs, the Boss to the Politburo and Father of the Peoples to his citizen subjects. The despot’s hands retained their tight grip on the levers of power; and as long as he drew breath, he could not be budged.

Appearances did not deceive: he was the unchallengeable despot. But those appearances so dazzled that they occluded his weaknesses from view. At the lower levels of state and society the infringements of the hierarchical principle were systemic. Not only in politics but throughout the administrative stratum of the USSR there was theft, corruption, nepotism, informal patronage, misreporting and general disorder. Regional, institutional and local interests were defended. The Soviet order paid workers and kolkhozniks a pittance but failed to impose a pattern of labour compliance conventional in the West. At the tasks of micromanagement this totalitarian system was an abject failure.

Stalin gave no sign that he knew this. Not once after the Second World War did he visit a factory, farm or even administrative office. He ruled by his wits. Seeing his fellow politicians, he tried to prise out of them such information as they contrived to keep from him. He held his dinner parties. He kept regular contacts with his organs of surveillance. He gave his orders and sent threatening telegrams. He closed off channels for the propagation of doctrine and opinions different from his own. He arranged arrests. Yet his ‘omnipotence’ did not permit him to perfect the pyramidal order. The lowest levels of the structure were constantly found out of place by his inspectors, but they had long ago ceased to tell him the full truth. When defects were announced to him, it was de rigueur to suggest that saboteurs, diversionists or foreign agents had been at work. No one dared insist that the trouble was inherent in the Soviet order and in the policies introduced and implemented by Stalin. It was the ultimate vicious circle. Stalin knew only what he wanted to know. His subordinates tried to tell him only what he wanted or what they wanted him to know. The Leader with the most penetrative power of any contemporary ruler was walled off from the modalities of the Soviet order at its lower levels. Master of all he surveyed, he saw only a small part of his country’s realities and controlled even less.

50. EMPEROR WORSHIP

Stalin sometimes claimed to be disconcerted by the extravagance of his cultic rituals. He asked for limits to the praise and muttered to his propagandists that they were overstepping them. In 1945, discussing plans for the first volume of his collected works, he proposed to restrict the print run to thirty thousand copies because of the paper shortage. Other participants in the meeting got him to agree to three hundred thousand copies, arguing that the public demand would be enormous.¹ Stalin also displayed caution a year later at a similar meeting to discuss the draft second edition of his biography. The flatteries irritated him:²

The future of the Revolution, Marxism and the USSR had to be considered. ‘And what,’ Stalin exclaimed, ‘if I’m no longer around?… You won’t be inculcating love for the party [through this draft]… What’s going to happen when I’m not here?’³

Yet Stalin did not seriously impede the fanfares: either he was playing psychological games or he could no longer be bothered to keep tight control in the area of propaganda. In 1946 his collected works appeared in a first print run of half a million copies. A million copies of the revised biography had been published by the end of 1947 alone — and ten million copies of the Short Course in party history were put into press at the same time.⁴ The worship of Stalin had become a state industry (and Stalin himself had dropped his half-hearted attempt to restrict the print run).

There was harsh iconographic control. An episode from 1946 illustrates the punitive care taken with the image of the Leader. The artist V. Livanova had painted a poster of ‘9 May — A Worldwide Victory Holiday’ for the Moscow publishing house Art. In line with normal procedure, the editors checked it for visual merit and political reliability before submitting it to the censor I. N. Kleiner in Glavlit, the central censorship body. But things then went wrong. The editors did not wait for a decision but sent the poster to be printed in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. By the time copies of the poster were shipped back for distribution in the USSR, two errors had been discovered. One was that there were only fifteen banners representing the Soviet republics of the USSR instead of sixteen. The other related to Stalin: his marshal’s star had six points instead of five. Investigation proved that the errors had been made by Livanova herself and not by miscreants in Germany (as had been suspected). Glavlit itself got into trouble for having failed to exercise due care. Kleiner was sacked and the terrified leadership of Glavlit, trying to prove its loyalty, asked to be subordinated to the Ministry of Internal Affairs.⁵

Pernicious significance was attributed to these slight errors. Enemies of the Soviet order might be calling for the USSR’s dismemberment by reducing the number of official banners. Perhaps there was an implied call here for Ukraine to break away from the USSR into independence. As for the depiction of Stalin’s marshal’s star with six points, this might suggest a plot to represent him as a friend of international Jewry since the Star of David also had six points.⁶

The cult was the centre of the belief system of Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism. While it had no creed, its devotees had to stick rigorously to formulaic terminology and imagery. Texts such as Marx’s Capital and Lenin’s The State and Revolution functioned like the Gospels, and the Short Course and Stalin’s official biography were equivalent to the Acts of the Apostles. The punctiliousness about words and pictures was reminiscent of Christian ecclesiastical traditions in the former Russian Empire — and Stalin, who had attended the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary till his twenty-first year, may well have been influenced, consciously or not, by his memory of the Orthodox Church’s unbending adherence to fixed rites, liturgy and images.⁷ Icon-painters represented sacred figures according to tightly prescribed rules. Perhaps this was the source for the extraordinarily detailed control over publicly available material on Stalin. If this indeed was the case, it must have reinforced the predisposition of the Marxist–Leninist doctrinaires to secure fidelity to the texts of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin to root out any trace of heterodoxy. Medieval Christianity and vulgar Marxism were a potent mixture.

The established impersonality of Stalin’s imagery was trundled down a narrow-gauge track. No Politburo member was allowed a public profile that might deflect people from adoring the Leader. Veteran comrades-in-arms such as Molotov, Kaganovich and Mikoyan came to notice only when they discharged particular duties: none of them was even mentioned in Nikolai Voznesenski’s The War Economy of the USSR; and there was no reference to them in the chapters added to the post-war editions of the Short Course and Stalin’s official biography.⁸

The Leader kept an aquiline watch over the products of Soviet propaganda. Even the Stalin Prize-winning novel The Young Guard by Alexander Fadeev incurred his displeasure. This was a best-seller depicting adolescent partisans working behind German lines in the war. Their bravery, determination and patriotism sounded a deep chord with readers and the book was especially popular with youth in the USSR. But Stalin had second thoughts. Unusually he had not read the text before the award of the prize. Ilya Ehrenburg recalled the Leader’s fury when he saw the rushes of the film made of the novel: ‘Here were youngsters left to their fate in a town seized by the Nazis. Where was the Komsomol organisation? Where was the party leadership?’⁹ The point for Stalin was that everyone should understand that victory in the war had been secured by the institutional framework and direction supplied by the hierarchies of state. Neither individuals nor even large social groups could be portrayed as operating autonomously. A codified version of historical reality was imposed. Anathema was pronounced upon any work showing Soviet citizens fighting effectively against the Wehrmacht without direct supervision by an administrative hierarchy stretching downwards from the Kremlin.

The war itself became something of an embarrassment to him. The Victory Day anniversary celebration was suspended after 1946 and not restored until after his death. Memoirs by generals, soldiers and civilians were banned. Stalin wanted to control, manipulate and canalise popular memory. The wartime reality could unsettle his plans for the post-war regime. Thoughts about how people coped and fought without reference to Stalin’s authority were dangerous.

The second edition of his official biography, presented to deafening fanfares in the media in 1947, added material on the Great Patriotic War and Stalin’s part in it. Amendments were also made to the existing chapters. Although the authors generally inflated the claims made about him, there was one exception. Whereas the first edition asserted that he had been arrested eight times and exiled seven times before 1914, the second reduced the numbers to seven and six respectively. But otherwise the new edition was an even more extravagant eulogy than before. The section on the Second World War hardly mentioned anyone but Stalin, and his one brief trip to the vicinity of the front was treated as crucial to the Red Army’s success. The narrative was little more than a list of battles. Government and army were mentioned. But drama, in so far as it existed in the chapters, was focused on decisions and inspiration provided by Stalin. The book entirely lacked an account of the difficulties of deliberation at Stavka or the contribution of other leaders and the people as a whole. The details of Stalin’s career in the war were overlooked; he was treated as the embodiment of the state and society in victory. Even more than before the Second World War he was an icon without personality. Stalin, the party, the Red Army and the USSR were represented as indistinguishable from each other.¹⁰

Stalin came ever closer to evicting Lenin from his primary status in the Soviet Union. There were indications of this in his preface to the first volume of his collected works. He expressed surprise that Lenin, who had developed the components of his telescoped Marxist theory of socialist revolution in 1905, had not fully divulged the fact until 1917.¹¹ Previously it had been incumbent on official propagandists to insist that Leninist policy had evolved in an unbroken line of positive change. Stalin by 1946 was suggesting that Lenin had missed a trick or two.

His rise in prestige at Lenin’s expense also took other forms. Officially commissioned paintings made the visual suggestion that the greater of the two communist leaders had been Stalin. This was done quite subtly. Typically Stalin stands confidently, pipe in hand, as he explains a matter of political strategy to an avidly listening Lenin: it is as if the roles of teacher and pupil have been reversed. Apart from the improbability of Lenin’s subordination, there was his known aversion to anyone smoking in his presence. Another unrealistic touch was the increasing tendency of artists to portray Stalin as taller than Lenin. In fact they were about the same size. It goes without saying that Stalin’s physical blemishes were carefully overlooked. Each year after the Second World War he appeared more and more like a tough, mature athlete in historical representations. The same line was pursued in films. In Mikhail Chiaureli’s Unforgettable 1919 Stalin is seen dispensing decisions imperturbably. The depiction shows him as exceptional in his refusal to panic. Always he appears to advocate the ‘correct’ decision, to universal acclaim. The survival of the Soviet state is made to seem mainly Stalin’s achievement.

This was done with deliberation. The policies of the leadership were deeply oppressive; elections and consultations with society at large were non-existent. Popular aspirations for a different kind of state and society were strong, and Soviet leaders regarded them as a menace. A scheme of indoctrination was put in hand to strengthen the carapace of the old regime. Force by itself would not work. Stalin was already the embodiment of the Soviet order and his appeal to citizens of the USSR was deep and extensive even among millions of people who hated his policies. The phenomenon is impossible to quantify: security police reports are impressionistic and marred by gross prejudices, and independent open surveys of mass opinion were not undertaken. But the reaction to Stalin’s death in March 1953, when popular grief took a widely hysterical form, indicates that respect and even affection for him was substantial. He incarnated pride in military victory. He stood for industrial might and cultural progress. Even if he had not wanted a cult to his greatness, such a cult would have had to be invented.

Public life functioned on the premise that all good things in the USSR flowed from the talents and beneficence of Joseph Stalin.¹² Among the expressions of the cult was The Book of Delicious and Healthy Food, whose prefatory epigraph consisted of the following quotation from him: ‘The defining peculiarity of our Revolution consists in its having given the people not only freedom but also material goods and the opportunity for a comfortable and cultured life.’¹³ No work of non-fiction could appear without mention of his genius. History, politics, economics, geography, linguistics and even chemistry, physics and genetics were said to be inadequately studied unless they incorporated his guiding ideas.

Yet this despot lacked, in the recesses of his mind, authentic confidence in his appearance. His gammy left arm, smallpox-pitted face and shortness of stature appear to have inhibited him from enjoying his cult as much as he might otherwise have done. He both loved and detested excesses of flattery. He also understood that the rarity of fresh images of him served to maintain public interest. Familiarity could have bred apathy or contempt. For such reasons he chose to place technical limits on his iconography to a greater extent than did most contemporary foreign rulers. He preferred to be painted rather than photographed. Even so, he did not like to sit for court painters; and when being painted, he expected to be aesthetically idealised and politically whitewashed. As the years rolled on, the number of images accorded the imprimatur of his approval dwindled. Declining to have new photos taken, he went on releasing the ones approved before the Second World War: this was true even of the second edition of his official biography (which had heavily airbrushed versions of photographs that had been published ever since the 1920s).¹⁴

A couple of exceptions existed. The biography included a photograph of him waving from the Kremlin Wall and a painting of him in his generalissimus’s uniform; but although both of them showed him as older than in earlier pictures, the effects of age were fudged. In the painting his moustache appeared dark and even the hair on his head had only a suggestion of grey. The face had no smallpox-pitted skin. His tunic hung on him with unnatural fineness and the medals on his chest, including his marshal’s five-pointed star, looked as if they were stuck to a flat board. This painting by the artist B. Karpov was used in posters, busts and books.¹⁵ There was also a photograph of him sitting with his fellow marshals; but his image was so small in relation to the page that his face and body were barely discernible — and anyway the airbrushers had again been at work: his shoulders were implausibly wide and he seemed larger than the other figures in the photo.¹⁶

Sporadic attempts to ‘humanise’ his image occurred. The most notable were the memoirs produced by the surviving Alliluevs. Anna Allilueva and her father Sergei, proud of their family’s past, recorded their impressions of Stalin before the October Revolution. These were published in 1946.¹⁷ Sergei’s book appeared posthumously: he had died, worn out by years of toil and worry and family tragedy, the previous July. Anna was alert to the risks of writing about Stalin and made a formal approach to Malenkov to assure herself that the book would have Stalin’s blessing.¹⁸ The texts were eulogistic and had gone through the censorship.¹⁹ But Sergei let slip that he had known Stalin as Soso Dzhughashvili. He also mentioned that Stalin’s first attempt to escape administrative exile in Novaya Uda in the winter of 1903–4 was marred by an elementary error: Stalin forgot to take warm clothing with him and his face and ears were severely frozen.²⁰ Anna’s memoir gave still more details about the private life of Stalin. She described how his damaged arm precluded him from being called up in the First World War. She related that he looked thinner and older after the February 1917 Revolution and that, when he came to live with the Alliluevs, he liked to tease the family maid. The memoir reported that Stalin slept in the same room as Sergei in late summer. It also described his approval of Nadya Allilueva’s zeal in tidying up the apartment. And it gave a comical account of Stalin’s fondness for his pipe: Anna recalled that he had fallen asleep with it lit and burned the sheets.²¹

Stalin soon regretted having sanctioned the Alliluev books. Anna was arrested in 1948 and sentenced to the camps for ten years for defaming him. He ignored her letter to him that she had cleared the project before publication and that she had done nothing wrong.²² She could hardly believe what was happening. She wrote to him defending her family and its record. Implicitly she accused ‘dear Joseph’ of ingratitude: ‘But there are people who our family simply saved from death. And this isn’t overpraise but the very truth, which it is very easy to prove.’²³ That she could send such a message to the Leader is a sign of her courage or stupidity. Enough of Stalin’s in-laws had perished before the Second World War for her to have known the kind of person she was addressing.

Although the widowed Olga Allilueva, to whom Stalin had expressed fond gratitude in 1915, was not persecuted, she became severely depressed. Nadya had killed herself in 1932, Pavel had died in 1938 and Fëdor had never recovered from the mental trauma of the trick played upon him by Kamo at the end of the Civil War. None of Olga’s children or children-in-law remained at liberty in the post-war years. Pavel’s widow Yevgenia did not save herself by marrying again and leaving the vicinity of Stalin: she had been arrested a year earlier than Anna and received the same punishment. Olga was inconsolable: she died a broken old woman in 1951. This was how Stalin rewarded the Alliluevs for the favours they had rendered him before the October Revolution. His Svanidze in-laws had already received his special expression of thanks. Alexander Svanidze had been arrested in the Great Terror and shot in 1942; his wife Maria had had a heart attack on receiving the news. Not only they but also the two sisters of Stalin’s first wife Ketevan — Maria and Alexandra — had perished before the end of the Second World War. The only close relatives who lived without fear of arrest were his children Svetlana and Vasili. They were the exceptions: the pattern was that a family connection with Stalin brought about repression.

The problem presented by the Alliluevs was that they knew him so well. He wished to float free of his personal history. Increasingly he opted for the status of state icon at the expense of a realistic image of himself. He became ever more detached and mysterious. It is true that he sometimes appeared on the Lenin Mausoleum to review the October Revolution or the May Day parades. But few spectators got more than a fleeting glimpse of him. Usually the police and the parade marshals hurried everyone across Red Square as fast as possible.²⁴

What people lacked in direct experience of Stalin, they often made up for in expressions of devotion to him. The universal genius of the father of all the peoples had to be acknowledged on every solemn occasion in schools, enterprises and offices. Gratitude for his life and career had to be manifested. Pravda quoted daily from his works. His photographs, old ones retouched for the current day, were regularly published — and sometimes paintings were brought out of store and turned into images looking like photographs. None of this damaged his standing since so few individuals actually met him: he had become a distant deity. Meetings started always with a paean to the Leader. Memory of a past when he had not been ruler was confined to a small minority of Soviet society. There was nothing in the USSR or in the other countries where communism was established which was deemed untouched by his genius. Images of him were hung on walls at work and in the home. His biography was conventionally given to youngsters on important occasions. Short of being called God on earth, Stalin had deified himself.

In 1949 when he (inaccurately) celebrated his seventieth birthday,²⁵ a tremendous fuss was made of him. He made a limp attempt to stop it getting out of hand, telling Malenkov: ‘Don’t even think of presenting me with another star!’ By this he meant he had had enough awards (and he continued to regret allowing himself to be called Generalissimus: when Churchill asked him what to call him, Marshal or Generalissimus, Stalin answered Marshal).²⁶ There was no chance that Malenkov would take this display of humility seriously. Laudatory books of memoirs were prepared for the great day. Articles proliferated in newspapers. On the day itself, 21 December, a vast balloon was sent up over the Kremlin and the image of Stalin’s moustachioed face was projected on to it. Processions in his honour had been organised the length and breadth of the USSR. The festival continued into the evening at the Bolshoi Theatre when guests from the Soviet political elite and from abroad assembled to do honour to the Leader. It was one of Stalin’s rare appearances and those who saw him were surprised at how physically diminished he seemed: they had been fed pictures from the cult and were unprepared for the human reality. Could it really be that the wizened old man before their gaze was the Great Stalin?

Yet they adjusted themselves to what they had seen. They reverted to admiration. Stalin might be elderly but he remained in their eyes the towering figure in the history of the USSR since the late 1920s. His had been the campaign to modernise, industrialise and educate in the 1930s, and — they thought — he had succeeded. His had been the leadership that had brought victory over the Nazi hordes. His was the firm hand at the helm of foreign policy in the storms of the Cold War. If the audience had doubts about his greatness, they quickly dispelled them. Hours of speeches reinforced the message that the world’s finest politician alive was present in the hall. Leader after leader extolled his significance for communism. The stage, decorated with banners and flowers, was occupied by foreign communist luminaries such as Mao Tse-tung, Palmiro Togliatti and Dolores Ibárruri (who had been in Moscow exile since the Spanish Civil War). Behind them was spread an enormous portrait of Stalin. He himself smiled occasionally and clapped the orators. Although he was hardly expansive in his gestures, he was a contented man. The entire communist movement was rendering him homage.

The cult of Stalin, lord of all he surveyed, spread far beyond Soviet borders. On posters and in the press his image was prominent, and failure by communist leaderships in eastern Europe to maintain public reverence was inconceivable. This attitude was internalised by individual leaders from the region whenever they had direct contact with him. Conversations with Stalin were treated as if subjects were being admitted to audiences with an emperor. The Hungarian Prime Minister, Ferenc Nagy, gushed at the outset of their exchanges: ‘The Hungarian government has recognised that a year after the [country’s] liberation it must come to Generalissimus Stalin to express its gratitude for Hungary’s liberation, for the freedom of Hungarian political life and for the independence of the Hungarian motherland.’²⁷ Nagy was not alone. Polish Prime Minister Bolesław Bierut declared: ‘We have come to you, comrade Stalin, as to our great friend so as to express our considerations on the course of events in Poland and check the correctness of our evaluation of the political situation in the country.’²⁸ Stalin was usually pleased by this abject submission to his will. But occasionally the reports did not please him, and when he reprimanded the Romanian communist leader Georgiu-Dej for mistaken policies, there was nothing for it but for Dej to ‘confess the erroneousness of his views’.²⁹

No one challenged this except, at a distance, the Yugoslavian communist leader Tito. Although fear of Soviet counter-measures against the communist leaderships of eastern Europe must have played a part, there was also genuine admiration for Stalin among them. Most of those communist parties in any case would have quickly been removed if the Soviet Army had not been in occupation. They depended heavily on Stalin’s goodwill, and they knew it. Even Mao Tse-tung, victor in the Chinese Civil War with little support and indeed much obstruction from Stalin, maintained an admiring public posture towards the Leader of the USSR. By 1952, when the Nineteenth Party Congress met in Moscow, the praise for Stalin from foreign leaders was downright glutinous. He was greeted with the shout: ‘Glory to the great Stalin!’ Statues, small metal busts and posters repeated the work of praise. To his dying day he heard hymns to himself as the master of the world communist movement.

51. DANGEROUS LIAISONS

The propaganda war intensified between the USSR and the Western Allies. Soviet diplomats treated their American and British counterparts as enemies and the feeling was reciprocated. Cultural contacts ceased. The countries of eastern Europe as well as the communist parties of western Europe fell in line with the Kremlin’s orders. In the West Stalin was depicted as the most evil dictator alive, quite as evil as the German Führer whom he had defeated. At the same time Pravda denigrated Truman and Attlee, characterising them as having the global ambitions — and the methods to match — which Hitler had developed. The two sides shared the assumption that a Third World War might occur between states which until 1945 had been united in armed struggle against the Wehrmacht. Two camps existed around the world, armed to the teeth and rivals for supremacy.

Neither camp, however, was looking for military conflict. Even Stalin, whose gloomy axiom was that a Third World War might be postponed but was ultimately inevitable,¹ did not wish to bring the USA to blows with the USSR. But events were stiffening his resolve to face down the Americans. The coincidence of the Soviet Union’s acquisition of the A-bomb and the communist seizure of power in China altered the balance of power in the world. Although American weapons technology remained ahead of its rival, Stalin was no longer going to be easily intimidated in diplomatic exchanges. Pravda announced the achievement with pride. The USA was depicted as a militarist menace to world peace and the Soviet state was put forward as the sole power which could resist American pretensions. What is more, the Chinese Revolution meant that the geopolitics of Asia in particular could never be the same again. Mao Tse-tung’s initial willingness to defer to Stalin in the interests of obtaining economic assistance was especially cheering to Moscow. Fours years after the end of the Second World War the Soviet Union was reclaiming its right to be treated as a global power on a level with the USA.

Few gifts, of course, come without wrapping; and Stalin knew that China’s resurgent power under communist leadership had the potential to complicate his statesmanship. Mao might assert himself like a Chinese Tito. The world communist movement, until then largely unified, would undergo fissiparous strain. There might be a direct clash between the People’s Republic of China and the USSR. Or things might deteriorate more indirectly. The People’s Republic of China could start acting in international relations without consulting the Kremlin and yet somehow entangle the USSR in the adverse consequences.

Stalin with all this in mind sent out his Minister of Communications, Ivan Kovalëv, to Beijing to see how closely the Chinese communists were following his recommendations. Unusually he showed Kovalëv’s report to Mao.² Stalin’s motives were hardly comradely. Probably he wanted to impress on Mao that the USSR knew more about China’s politics than Mao had imagined. Kovalëv revealed that little serious effort had been made to win over the Chinese working class to the revolutionary cause. He mentioned that land reform was geographically patchy. Kovalëv was also unimpressed by the ideological preparation of the party cadres. Indeed he noted tensions in the Beijing leadership. Kovalëv told Stalin directly that some leaders were not only anti-American but also anti-Soviet. Mao’s close associate Chou En-lai had been heard to wonder why, if Beijing was being told to avoid annoying the USA, it should reject overtures from blackballed Yugoslavia.³ There was plenty to provoke Stalin’s suspicions and he let Mao know that, unless China toed the Soviet line, assistance from Moscow would not be forthcoming.

Diplomatic relations between the USA and the USSR were not broken, but both Moscow and Washington understood that global politics had entered a period of intensified uncertainty. Stalin especially wanted to secure Soviet interests vis-à-vis communist China. He started as he meant to go on. Devastated by decades of civil war, China urgently required foreign economic assistance, and the USSR was the sole possible source for it. Stalin intended to drive a hard bargain. While content to nudge China towards spreading communist political influence in eastern Asia, he demanded Chinese acceptance of the primacy of the Soviet Union in the world communist movement.

Yet events in the Far East tempted him to risk moving over to an offensive foreign policy. Since Korea’s liberation from Japanese occupation there had been intermittent civil war, and two separate states had emerged on the peninsula in 1948. The same American military shield which defended Japan protected southern Korea with Seoul as its capital. Meanwhile northern Korea had a communist government, based in Pyongyang, which looked to Moscow for assistance. The armies confronting each other had abundant supplies of equipment and advisers; and both Korean states behaved on the assumption that sooner or later a definitive resumption of hostilities would take place. The Korean communist leader Kim Il-Sung went to Moscow in March 1949 and requested a large increase in assistance so that he might attack the south.⁴ Stalin refused, advising the Korean comrades to get on with their preparations but to fight only if invaded. Kim Il-Sung, however, wanted to go to war and continued to act provocatively towards Seoul. He refused to cease making representations to Stalin. In March 1950 he returned to Moscow and argued passionately that the south was there for the taking. If China could be unified under Mao Tse-tung, he asserted, Korea was ready for similar treatment under Kim Il-Sung.

Stalin had customarily parried such demands from foreign communist leaders, but Kim Il-Sung touched a raw nerve and Stalin suddenly gave way. It cannot have been the Korean’s persuasiveness which led to the turnabout: Stalin was too circumspect for that. Much had happened since 1945. The USSR’s acquisition of both its own nuclear-bomb capacity and a powerful communist ally in China encouraged him to think that it no longer needed to play its hand weakly against the USA.

He had badly underestimated the revolutionary potential of the Chinese Communist Party. He confessed this in the presence of Bulgarian and Yugoslav leaders at a Kremlin discussion on 10 February 1948. According to Dimitrov’s diary, he said:⁵

Stalin was performing the role of a leader who recognises his own fallibility in order to get his way on the Balkans. But a bullying style came more naturally to him. The People’s Republic of China, with its military and economic potential, could become a handful inside the world communist movement and Mao Tse-tung could become his nightmare. So for once he was probably blurting out what he really thought.

Belatedly he saw the need to deal more tactfully with Mao. Kim Il-Sung had made his final plea at a moment when Stalin was most amenable to having his mind changed; and anyway Stalin could not be certain that the Chinese would not support Kim Il-Sung even regardless of the USSR’s consent. Stalin did not disclose his calculations. Molotov was by then in semi-official disgrace and was no longer privy to his thoughts, and everyone in the Ministry of External Affairs simply followed Stalin’s orders.

Thus it came about in their meetings in Moscow in April and May 1950 that Stalin sanctioned Kim Il-Sung’s request to support the Korean communist resumption of war. Both Stalin and Mao had allowed themselves to be persuaded that the military campaign would be short and successful.⁶ Soviet arms, munitions and other equipment were carried by the Trans-Siberian Railway to Korea. Kim Il-Sung began his offensive on 25 June. Superior in every sector of military resources, the Korean communist forces swept south and captured Seoul three days later. It looked as if the basic premise of Stalin’s discussion with Kim Il-Sung was about to be realised as a rapid victory was achieved before the rest of the world could blink. But the two communist interlocutors had made a profound miscalculation. Truman was shocked but not deterred. Instead he ordered his diplomats to go before the United Nations Organisation Security Council and secure a vote in favour of armed intervention to prevent the overrunning of South Korea. This task was facilitated by a previous blunder by Stalin who, objecting to the continued recognition of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime in Taiwan as the legitimate Chinese government and its right to occupy China’s seat in the Security Council, had been boycotting the body. In the absence of a Soviet veto, the Security Council approved the American proposal. Stalin repudiated the advice of his Ministry of External Affairs to drop the boycott so as to prevent the Americans and their allies from landing with the legitimacy conferred by the sanction of the United Nations.⁷

This was hamfistedness on a scale he had not shown since 1941. The United Nations forces, primarily American, were led by General Douglas MacArthur. Their rapid deployment was made possible by the American occupation of nearby Japan, and by the end of September they had already halted the communist advance and retaken Seoul. Next month they had crossed the 38th Parallel into north Korea. Kim Il-Sung was desperate; he had no alternative but to turn to Stalin for direct military assistance even though he knew the likely response. Mao Tse-tung was less reluctant since he assumed that war between the USA and the People’s Republic of China was just a matter of time. The Chinese resolved upon aid for the Korean communists before consulting Stalin. But Mao still expected the Kremlin to send weapons for the use of the twelve divisions about to be dispatched by China.⁸ The news of MacArthur’s success came through to Moscow; it was relayed to Stalin beside the Black Sea. His was a curiously semi-detached oversight over Soviet security interests notwithstanding his ability to stay in touch by phone and telegrams. When he was down in the south he held none of the frantic face-to-face discussions with political and military leaders such as had been his wont in the Second World War. Suddenly the crisis on the Korean peninsula deepened, and Stalin had to take a strategic decision. Kim Il-Sung demanded urgent additional assistance, pointing out that without help the communists would soon lose the entire war.

Stalin had the choice either to accede to Kim Il-Sung’s request or simply to withdraw from the war before things got entirely out of hand. The problem was that geopolitics would certainly be transformed in favour of the USA unless the Korean communist cause was supported; and the humiliation for Stalin and the USSR would be immense since it was an open secret that Soviet covert assistance to Kim Il-Sung had already been substantial. It was a tricky moment. While cursing himself for having been taken in by Kim Il-Sung earlier in the year, he could hardly fail him in his time of crisis. Yet he also had to be wary of escalating the hostility between the USSR and the USA to the point that open war might break out between them. He chose the option of cunning. On 1 October he sent a telegram to Beijing calling on Mao to transfer ‘six or seven divisions’ to the 38th Parallel. This was the line of latitude which cut Korea politically in half. If the communists could repel the American advance at that point, Kim Il-Sung would hold on to an area of respectable size. At all costs Stalin needed to avoid a direct collision between the forces of the USA and the USSR while continuing to protect Soviet geopolitical interests. Mao needed some persuading that the Chinese alone should take such responsibility for the defence of north Korea. It seemed odd that Stalin, having recently pulled rank over Mao as the leader of an already mighty military and economic power, should shuffle off the burden of war so readily. How could Stalin square the circle?

He did it mainly by force of argument. Writing to Beijing, he stated:⁹

The effrontery of this case is unmistakable. Still he was essentially claiming that the Americans would have no stomach for a fight. But if this was true, why did Stalin insist on the Chinese doing his fighting for him?

The People’s Republic of China in any case had a continuing horror that its territorial integrity would be threatened if Syngman Rhee, the Korean politician supported by the Americans in the south of the country, were to rule all Korea. Tense negotiations followed. While Stalin tried to get the Chinese to fight in the Far East on behalf of world communism, Mao and his comrades sought the maximum amount of Soviet equipment. Both sides came close to breaking up their talks about Korea.¹⁰ Stalin’s brinkmanship on 12 October involved sending a letter advising Kim Il-Sung that the war was lost and that he should evacuate his forces to safety in China and the USSR.¹¹ Mao gave way next day, and Stalin was able to announce to Kim that the Korean comrades would soon be receiving massive reinforcement by Chinese troops. Theoretically the troops would be volunteers, but in practice they would consist of divisions drawn directly from the People’s Liberation Army. On 19 October they crossed the Yalu river on to Korean territory. Within days they were engaging the forces led by the Americans.¹² They fought with the assistance promised by Stalin. Soviet armaments and munitions were abundantly supplied; and, in the case of fighter planes, Stalin was sufficiently keen that the aircraft should be properly handled that he provided his own aviators dressed in Chinese uniforms.

Stalin after some vacillation had complied. What had started as a war fought on the far edge of Asia had the potential to explode into a global conflict with the victorious members of the Grand Alliance at each other’s throats. Stalin did not reveal his calculations but probably he was exercised by a mixture of factors. He did not want an American puppet state of Korea on his borders. He did not wish the USSR to lose prestige in the world communist movement when the People’s Republic of China aided a fellow communist power. He may also have felt that Mao had a serious chance of pulling off what Kim had failed to do. The logistics of military supply were easier for China and the USSR than for the USA. Perhaps Stalin was also guessing that American forces would be tied down and exhausted in Korea even if they were not defeated outright. Stalin’s basic assumption was that world war could be postponed but not made avoidable. Whatever he may have calculated about the Korean situation, though, he let on to nobody what it was. He was in a position, as in August 1939 when Ribbentrop came a-courting to the Kremlin, to ignore the opinions of others; and he made it a habit to leave few traces of his mental pathway to each important decision. This helped him to go on keeping the rest of the world guessing. The more enigmatic he was in global politics, the less likely he was to be taken for granted.

Events in Korea increased in difficulty as Stalin and his associates pondered what to do. Broader factors came into play. Stalin the pragmatist was also a man of ideological assumptions, and he genuinely believed that the treaties signed at the end of the Second World War were documents destined to be ripped up when the world descended into a Third World War. Chances to expand communist influence in the meantime had to be seized. Stalin’s spies led him to conclude that Truman would not intervene to save the unpopular southern government.¹³ The USSR had acquired effective nuclear weapons in August 1949 and had to be handled more carefully by the USA. The Sino-Soviet alliance boosted Moscow’s global weight still further — and indeed Stalin had to take account of the fact that Mao Tse-tung was fully capable of offering active support to Kim Il-Sung regardless of Stalin’s wishes: Mao had greater freedom of choice than even Tito.

The Chinese entry into the Korean War turned the scales in favour of the communist cause. Mao’s People’s Liberation Army crossed the Yalu river into Korea on 19 October 1950 and MacArthur’s campaign hit serious trouble, especially after the arrival of the Soviet air units in the following month.¹⁴ The movement towards a world war shifted up another notch on 31 December when Chinese forces thrust south and crossed the 38th Parallel. Seoul was taken the next month. MacArthur demanded permission to carry the fighting on to Chinese soil. At this time neither Stalin nor Mao was in the mood for compromise. Mao’s own son was mobilised for the war. (He was killed in action.)¹⁵ It looked as if the Americans were about to lose the war on the Korean peninsula.¹⁶

Meanwhile Stalin had to deal with Europe, and he was especially concerned about Italy and France. Greece was already settled in Stalin’s mind: he had not intervened in the Civil War there, had resented Greek communist demands for permission to operate as if a socialist seizure of power was possible and had left Athens to the repressive zeal of the Alexandros Diomidis government. Italy and France were a different matter: their communist parties gave him much less trouble and it had been easy to quell those of their leaders who seriously contemplated insurrection in Rome and Paris. As relations worsened with the Western Allies, they became pawns in Stalin’s European game. Although his strategy remained the avoidance of war with the USA, he did not mind making things awkward for the Americans wherever he could. For this reason he demanded a more boisterous policy for the Italian Communist Party and the French Communist Party. This was explained to the representatives from Italy and France at the Second Conference of the Cominform in June 1948. As usual, Stalin and the Soviet leaders admitted no mistake on their part. Instead Togliatti, Thorez and their subordinates were blamed for not seeing the need for more radical measures than the Kremlin had previously stipulated.

By the beginning of the 1950s Stalin’s grip on world affairs was weaker than in previous years. The Korean War was raging and, with Soviet pilots and military equipment involved, was capable of spiralling into a Third World War. The Chinese People’s Republic complicated everything by urging Stalin to fight to the bitter end; Mao Tse-tung by his behaviour showed he could be just as independent of Moscow as Tito — and the stakes of China’s foreign adventures were very high indeed. Stalin could not even control all the communist parties in Europe. When he summoned Palmiro Togliatti to leave Italy and take the leading position in the Cominform, he received a brisk refusal. Togliatti wanted to guide the Italian Communist Party through the complications of post-war Italian politics and had no interest in putting his life at risk by working in proximity to Stalin. Meanwhile Tito stayed imperturbably in supreme office in Belgrade. Elsewhere in eastern Europe there was the silence of the political graveyard; but the People’s Democracies were far from quiet below the surface: resentment of the communist seizure of power in these countries was deep, and only the threat of unconditional repression kept order for Stalin.

Yet it was the Korean War which constituted the most deadly danger to Soviet interests. Stalin could not overlook the Americans’ advantage in the number of nuclear weapons and in the proximity of their foreign airbases to the USSR. Perhaps, though, he knew more about Truman’s intentions than anyone realised at the time. Soviet agents existed in the British establishment. Among them were Kim Philby and Donald Maclean. When Prime Minister Clement Attlee flew to Washington in early December 1950 to protest at confidential American discussions on using nuclear bombs in the Korean War, he was given an assurance by President Truman that only conventional weaponry would be deployed. It is highly probable that Maclean, head of the American desk at the Foreign Office, dispatched the news to Moscow. Stalin would thereby have known that Truman was not looking for a fight.¹⁷ Even so, there could still have been a world war with conventional weaponry; and there was no way of guaranteeing that one side or the other would not, in a desperate moment, resort to its nuclear arsenal. Although he was not a totally reckless gambler, Stalin was not a cautious one either. He risked much, much more than he should have done if he really regarded peace around the world as a supreme priority.

The Third World War did not break out. But the situation developed in a manner perilously close to all-out global conflict; and much responsibility lay on Stalin’s shoulders. If he had not financed and equipped Kim Il-Sung, the civil war in Korea could not have been resumed with the intensity it attained.

52. VOZHD AND INTELLECTUAL

The Vozhd retained his cerebral interests. He told people he read up to five hundred pages a day,¹ and the books he chose were of the kind he had enjoyed for years. Among them was Germinal by Émile Zola, whom he had discovered as an adolescent.² He continued to love Shota Rustaveli’s medieval Georgian epic, Knight in the Panther’s Skin.³ Having found his favourites early in life, he did not abandon them in old age and his resumed support for the fraudulent geneticist Timofei Lysenko continued to prevent progress in Soviet biology and threaten the lives and careers of Lysenko’s academic and political opponents.⁴

Marxism, architecture, linguistics, genetics and international relations were among Stalin’s intellectual interests. Historical works especially attracted him. He kept up with writings on both the Russian past and the annals of Mesopotamia, ancient Rome and Byzantium.⁵ When the fancy took him, he held conversations with physicists, biologists and other scientists. He examined the novels winning his annual Stalin Prize and listened to gramophone records of folk and classical music before they appeared in the shops (and gave them ratings from ‘good’ to ‘awful’). In Moscow he attended ballets, operas and concerts. He had his dachas equipped so that he could vet Soviet films before their public release. Volga! Volga! was his favourite film.⁶ He read, listened and watched mainly for personal delight and self-instruction. Foreign contemporary writers failed to attract him. Living writers had to be Soviet. Not that this saved them from his anger if he disapproved of one of their books. He had never been slow to say what he thought about cultural artefacts regardless of whether he knew much about the subject. Nobody in the USSR was in a position to ignore his predilections. If ever an obsessive intellectual dilettante existed, Stalin was that person.

Yet he made only three public speeches from 1946 onwards and two of these lasted just a few minutes.⁷ His articles were few and he published no booklets after the war until Marxism and Problems of Linguistics in 1950.⁸ Not since the end of the Civil War had he written less for the press. The consequence was that his infrequent smaller pieces functioned as the guidelines for what others in communist public life at home and abroad could print or broadcast.

All the same he made plain his desire to counteract the fashion for admiration of foreign culture and science. When President Truman sent him some bottles of Coca-Cola, Stalin reacted angrily and ordered food scientist Mitrofan Lagidze to develop a superior pear-based fizzy drink to send in return. (For once some sympathy with Stalin is in order.)⁹ Praising only the achievements of the USSR, Stalin aimed to enclose the USSR deeper in intellectual quarantine. The main exception to this was kept secret: he relied heavily on scientific and technological espionage to steal the foreign discoveries needed for the development of Soviet military and industrial might. Otherwise the guiding principle was that everything foreign was inferior and damaging. With this in mind he called Alexander Fadeev and two literary colleagues, Konstantin Simonov and Boris Gorbatov, to the Kremlin along with Molotov and Zhdanov on 13 May 1947. Fadeev, Chairman of the USSR Union of Writers, was expecting to discuss book royalties policy. But Stalin had an ulterior motive. Once policy on royalties had been settled, he handed over a letter for Fadeev to read aloud to the gathering. The contents related to a possible anti-cancer drug developed by two Soviet scientists who had released details about it to American publishers.¹⁰ Fadeev was terrified as Stalin did his trick of walking up and down behind the backs of his guests. As Fadeev turned towards him, the sight of Stalin — stern-faced and watchful — agitated him further. Stalin declared: ‘We’ve got to liquidate the spirit of self-humiliation.’

Fadeev was relieved to hear he was not in trouble but was being entrusted with the campaign against foreign influences and fashions. This could not be done by the Ministry of External Affairs without unsettling relations with the West.¹¹ (Just for once the eyewitnesses could record Stalin’s specific calculations.) Stalin was planning to complete the closure of the Soviet intellectual mind. His own mind was already insulated from foreign influences. Now he was plotting the systematic reproduction of his mentality across the USSR.

Simonov wrote down Stalin’s words:¹²

Stalin continued:¹³

Although Stalin was an admirer of Peter the Great, he was setting himself up as a ruler who could finally eradicate the syndrome of the feelings of inferiority characteristic of Russian intellectual life since the Petrine epoch.

By the Second World War he had stopped deluding himself that he could increase his control over the Soviet order, but in most ways he was proud of what he had consolidated.¹⁴ He acknowledged that great changes would have to take place before the communism of Marx, Engels and Lenin could be realised. Yet he inserted his own peculiar ideas. In the 1920s he had of course stirred up controversy by saying that socialism could be constructed in a single country surrounded by hostile capitalist states. This had contrasted with the convention of Bolshevik theorists, including Lenin, that there would have to be more than one powerful state committed to socialism before such construction could be completed. Before the war Stalin had gone further by suggesting that the building of communism — the perfect stateless form of society dreamed about by Marxists until his emergence — could be started in the USSR on its own.¹⁵

Stalin had explained his idea to the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939: ‘Shall our state also be retained in the period of communism? Yes, it will be retained unless capitalist encirclement is liquidated and unless the danger of military attack from abroad is liquidated.’¹⁶ He gave no indication of how the state would, as Lenin had anticipated in The State and Revolution in 1917–18, ‘wither away’. Molotov brought this theoretical inadequacy to Stalin’s attention. The root of the problem could be traced back to the assertion in the USSR Constitution of 1936 that the Soviet state functioned on the principle of from each according to his abilities, to each according to his work. As Molotov had argued, this was not the real state of affairs in the USSR. Socialism was not yet near to completion. It was especially wrong to treat the kolkhozes as a socialist form of economy. Huge unfairness existed in the administration of society. Molotov also rejected the whole contention that socialism could be brought to completion in a single country. Building could start; it could be continued. Yet it could not be consummated.¹⁷ Stalin understood what Molotov was saying but fobbed him off: ‘I recognise theory, but I understand things like this: this is life and not theory.’¹⁸ Life, as Stalin saw it from the late 1930s, required the spreading of pride in the existing order of state and society even if this involved sullying the purity of Leninist doctrines.

He took intense delight in Soviet achievements. As he and Georgian Communist Party boss Akaki Mgeladze looked at a map, he mused:¹⁹

He was equally pleased about the east: ‘What have we got here?… The Kurile Islands are now ours, Sakhalin is wholly ours: doesn’t that look good! And Port Arthur and Dalni [Darien] are both ours. The Chinese Railway is ours. As to China and Mongolia, everything’s in order.’ The only frontier annoying him was the southern one. Presumably he itched to obtain the Straits of the Dardanelles and perhaps also northern Iran. He had come to aspire to the restoration of the Russian Imperial frontiers and regard the foreign policy objectives of the Romanovs as his own; and works on the history of Muscovy and the Russian Empire, including Nikolai Karamzin’s classic nineteenth-century series of volumes, had an increased appeal for him.

Stalin’s passion for things Russian had become hypertrophied. When reading V. V. Piotrovski’s In the Steps of Ancient Cultures, he came across the name ‘Rusa’ in a section on the Assyrians. He took note of this,²⁰ evidently thinking the word might give a clue about the origins of Russian nationhood. Anything with the slightest connection with Russia caught his eye. Like an elderly trainspotter who has to see one last steam engine before giving up the hobby, he had turned from enthusiast into zealot.

Few authors failed to incur some criticism from him. Piotrovski was among them. On the margin of the page where the author had claimed credentials as a pioneer in the historiography of culture, Stalin scoffed: ‘Ha, ha!’²¹ Stalin had combed purposefully through Piotrovski’s book. The notes he took on the ancient languages of the Middle East were important for him, for he intended to write a lengthy piece on linguistics. To say that this caused surprise among the Soviet intelligentsia is an understatement. The expectation had been that when he took up the pen again he would offer his thoughts on politics or economics. But Stalin went his own way. In the course of his extensive reading he had come across the works of Nikolai Marr. A member of the Russian Imperial Academy before 1917, Marr had made his peace with the Soviet state and adjusted his theories to the kind of Marxism popular in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. Marr had argued that Marxists should incorporate ‘class principles’ in linguistics as much as in politics. Language was to be regarded as class-specific and as the creation of whichever class happened to be in power. This was the official orthodoxy which Stalin had decided to overthrow.

Articles appeared in Pravda in summer 1950 and were collected in a booklet entitled Marxism and Problems of Linguistics. University faculties across the USSR stopped whatever they were doing to study Stalin’s ideas.²² Much of what he wrote was a healthy antidote to current ideas in Soviet linguistics. Marr had argued that the contemporary Russian language had been a bourgeois phenomenon under capitalism and should be re-created as a socialist phenomenon under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Stalin thought this was claptrap. He insisted that language had its roots in an earlier period of time; in most societies, indeed, it was formed before the capitalist epoch. Recent changes in Russian involved mainly the introduction of new words to the lexicon and the abandonment of old words as political and economic conditions were transformed. Grammatical tidying also took place. But the Russian language written and spoken by Alexander Pushkin in the early nineteenth century contrasted little with the language of the mid-twentieth century.²³ While some classes had had their own jargon and some regions their own dialect, the fundamental language had been common to all Russians.²⁴

Stalin’s motives baffled those politicians and intellectuals accustomed to his polemical contributions on world politics, political dictatorship and economic transformation. His usual menace was barely evident. Only once did the anger show itself. This happened when he said that if he had not known about a particular writer’s sincerity, he would have suspected deliberate sabotage.²⁵ Otherwise Stalin kept to the proprieties of a patient, modest teacher.

Marxism and Problems of Linguistics has been unjustly ignored. Despite turning to leading linguisticians such as Arnold Chikobava for advice, Stalin wrote the work by himself; and he did nothing without a purpose.²⁶ It was far from being only about linguistics. The contents also show his abiding interest in questions of Russian nationhood. At one point he stated magisterially that the origins of ‘the Russian national language’ can be traced to the provinces of Kursk and Orël.²⁷ Few linguisticians would nowadays accept this opinion. But it retains an importance in Soviet history, for it demonstrates Stalin’s desire to root Russianness in the territory of the RSFSR. This was especially important for him because some philologists and historians regarded Kiev in contemporary Ukraine as the Russian language’s place of origin. Moreover, he used the language of Russians as an example of the longevity and toughness of a national tongue. Despite all the invasions of the country and the various cultural accretions, the Russian language was conserved over centuries and emerged ‘the victor’ over efforts to eradicate it.²⁸ Frequently praising the works of Alexander Pushkin, Stalin left no doubt about the special nature of Russia and the Russians in his heart.

Yet this fascination with the ‘Russian question’ did not exclude a concern with communism and globalism. Stalin in fact asserted that eventually national languages would disappear as socialism covered the world. In their place would arise a single language for all humanity, evolving from ‘zonal’ languages which in turn had arisen from those of particular nations.²⁹ The widely held notion that Stalin’s ideology had turned into an undiluted nationalism cannot be substantiated. He no longer espoused the case for Esperanto. But his current zeal to play up Russia’s virtues did not put an end to his Marxist belief that the ultimate stage in world history would bring about a society of post-national globalism.

Nevertheless it was his zeal for Russia and the Soviet Union which took up most space in his intellectual considerations. This was clear in his very last book. He had written it in his own hand, refusing as usual to dictate his thoughts to a secretary.³⁰ The book, appearing shortly before the Nineteenth Party Congress in 1952, was The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. It followed a public discussion on the topic inaugurated at Stalin’s behest in November 1951; and in preparation for his own contribution he instructed Malenkov to acquaint himself with recent writings on political economy. Malenkov had been required to undertake many difficult tasks in his career but the instant assimilation of the whole corpus of Marxism was one of the most arduous.³¹ Stalin recognised that he had neither the time nor the energy — nor even perhaps the intellectual capacity — to compose an innovative general conspectus on political economy. But it was well within his mental powers to indicate his preferred framework in so far as the USSR was affected. He aimed to supply guidelines for policies expected to stay in place for many years ahead. The Economic Problems of Socialism was intended by an ailing Leader as his intellectual testament.³²

The book outlines several supposed heresies to be avoided by Soviet Marxists. First and foremost, Stalin argued against those who thought that economic transformation could be effected by the mere application of political will. Stalin maintained that ‘laws’ of development conditioned what was possible under socialism as much as under capitalism.³³ Stupendous hypocrisy was on display here. If ever there had been an attempt to transform an economy through sheer will and violence, it had been at the end of the 1920s under Stalin’s leadership.

But in 1952 Stalin was determined to avoid further tumult. He very much wanted to end speculation that the kolkhozes might soon be turned into fully state-owned and state-directed collective farms (sovkhozy). For the foreseeable future, he insisted, the existing agricultural organisational framework would be maintained. Ideas about the construction of ‘agrotowns’ were also to be put aside. Similarly he continued to insist that investment in the capital-goods sector of industry had to take precedence in the USSR state budget. Although an increase of goods produced for Soviet consumers was a priority, it still had to take second place to machine tools, armaments and lorries and indeed to iron and steel in general. Stalin was writing exclusively about economics. His was not a general treatise on political economy. Yet while recommending steady maturation rather than any sharp break in economic policies and structures, he offered a firm implicit rationale for the existing system of politics. Stalin was content with his labours in the past few decades. The political institutions, procedures and attitudes which already existed were to remain in place while the Leader was alive and long afterwards.

In international relations, though, he anticipated a more dynamic development. Stalin posed two questions:³⁴

As theorist-in-chief of the world communist movement, Stalin answered as follows: ‘I don’t think it is possible to make this assertion. In the light of the new conditions arising in connection with the Second World War, both theses need to be regarded as having lost their force.’³⁵ He looked east for his explanation:³⁶

Stalin asserted that the world had been changed by the numerical increase in communist states. The territorial contraction of the global capitalist market would not end but instead would intensify the rivalries among capitalist economies.³⁷ Although Germany and Japan had been militarily humbled, they would recover industrially and commercially to compete fiercely with the USA, the United Kingdom and France. The victors themselves had conflicting interests. The USA aimed to be the globe’s dominant capitalist power and sought an end to the empires of its Western allies. A Third World War was to be expected. Stalin put it dogmatically: ‘In order to eliminate the inevitability of war it is necessary to annihilate imperialism.’³⁸ In old age he cleaved to the credo that capitalism was doomed. He also continued to believe that socialism had an inherent capacity to nurture technological advance. This was an old Marxist idea. For Marx and Lenin it was axiomatic that capitalist development would eventually enter a cul-de-sac and would actively prevent the development of industrial products of general human benefit.³⁹

The aspect of Stalin’s thought that has captured the greatest attention, however, is his attitude to Jews. No irrefutable evidence of anti-semitism is available in his published works. His denial before the First World War that the Jews were a nation was made on technical grounds; it cannot be proved that he defined nationhood specifically in order to exclude Jews.⁴⁰ He did not refuse to allow Jewish people the right to cultural self-expression after the October Revolution; indeed his People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs gave money and facilities to groups promoting the interests of Jews.⁴¹ Yet the charges against him also included the accusation that his supporters highlighted anti-semitic themes in the struggle against Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev in the 1920s.⁴² Within his family he had opposed his daughter’s dalliance with the Jewish film-maker Alexei Kapler.⁴³ Yet the fact that his followers exploited anti-Jewish feelings in internal party disputes does not make him personally an anti-semite. As a father, moreover, he had much reason to discourage Svetlana from having anything to do with the middle-aged, womanising Kapler.

His campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ cannot be automatically attributed to hatred of Jews as Jews. He moved aggressively against every people in the USSR sharing nationhood with peoples of foreign states. The Greeks, Poles and Koreans had suffered at his hands before the Second World War for this reason.⁴⁴ Campaigns against cosmopolitanism started up when relations between the Soviet Union and the USA drastically worsened in 1947.⁴⁵ At first Jews were not the outstanding target. But this did not remain true for long. A warm reception was accorded by twenty thousand Jews to Golda Meir at a Moscow synagogue in September 1948 after the foundation of Israel as a state.⁴⁶ This infuriated Stalin, who started to regard Jewish people as subversive elements. Yet his motives were of Realpolitik rather than visceral prejudice even though in these last years some of his private statements and public actions were undeniably reminiscent of crude antagonism towards Jews.

Yet Beria and Kaganovich, who was Jewish, absolved their master of anti-semitism.⁴⁷ (Not that they were moral arbiters on anything.) Certainly Kaganovich felt uncomfortable at times. Stalin’s entourage were crude in their humour. One day Stalin asked: ‘But why do you pull so very gloomy a face when we’re laughing at the Jews? Look at Mikoyan: when we’re laughing at the Armenians, Mikoyan laughs along with us at the Armenians.’ Kaganovich replied:⁴⁸

Stalin relented and Kaganovich, hardly the most sensitive of men, was allowed to stay out of the banter. The episode by itself does not exculpate Stalin; and it must be added that some of his remarks to others in the early 1950s were vicious in the extreme about Soviet Jews. Perhaps he turned into an anti-semite right at the end. Or possibly he was using violent language in order to drum up political support. He was too inscrutable to allow a verdict.

What is clear is that the mind of Stalin is irreducible to a single dimension. Some see him as a Russian nationalist. For others the driving force of his ideas was anti-semitism. A further school of thought postulated that in so far as he had ideas they were those of a Realpolitiker; this version of Stalin appears in various guises: the first is a leader who pursued the traditional goals of the tsars, the second is an opportunistic statesman yearning to stand tall alongside the leaders of the other great powers. And there are some — nowadays remarkably few — who describe him as a Marxist.

Stalin’s intellectual thought was really an amalgam of tendencies, and he expressed himself with individuality within each of them. He had started as an adult by looking at the world through a Marxist prism, but it had been Marxism of the Leninist variant — and he had adjusted this variant, at times distorting it, to his liking. Lenin’s Marxism had been a compound of Marx’s doctrines with other elements including Russian socialist terrorism. Stalin’s treatment of Leninism was similarly selective; and, like Lenin, he was loath to acknowledge that anything but the purest legacy of Marx and Engels informed his Marxism–Leninism. But his ideas on rulership were undoubtedly characterised by ideas of Russian nationhood, empire, international geopolitics and a generous dose of xenophobic pride. At any given time these tendencies were in play in his mind even if it was solely the members of his entourage who glimpsed the range of his sources. He did not systematise them. To have done so would have involved him in revealing how much he had drawn from thinkers other than Marx, Engels and Lenin. In any case he shrank from codifying ideas that he sensed would cramp his freedom of action if ever they were to be set in stone.

Stalin was a thoughtful man and throughout his life tried to make sense of the universe as he found it. He had studied a lot and forgotten little. His learning, though, had led to only a few basic changes in his ideas. Stalin’s mind was an accumulator and regurgitator. He was not an original thinker nor even an outstanding writer. Yet he was an intellectual to the end of his days.

53. AILING DESPOT

Stalin’s medical condition had steadily worsened. The cardiac problems from late 1945 compelled him to spend weeks away from the Kremlin. He could no longer cope with the previous burdens of official duty. Chronic overwork was exacting its toll. Having risen to political supremacy, he could have slackened his routines. But Stalin was a driven man. He thrashed himself as hard as he did his subordinates. He could no more spend a day in indolence than he was able to leap to the moon. Stalin, unlike Hitler, was addicted to administrative detail. He was also ultra-suspicious in his ceaseless search for signs that someone might be trying to dislodge his policies or supplant him as the Leader.

His previous medical history included appendicitis, painful corns, laryngitis and probably psoriasis.¹ His chronic mistrust of the medical profession had done him no favours. Admittedly even Stalin could not do entirely without doctors; but Kremlin specialists were nervous when treating him and arrests of individuals accused of poisoning Politburo members and other prominent public figures were frequent. Dr Moshentseva offered a bizarre and rather implausible account. When Stalin was brought to the clinic for treatment for an ‘enormous abscess’ on his foot, his face and body were reportedly covered in a blanket and she was instructed to fold back only the bottom edge. Not until later did she discover the identity of her patient.² Less fortunate was Stalin’s personal physician Vladimir Vinogradov. In January 1952, after giving the Leader a check-up, he advised him to retire from politics to prevent fatal damage to his health. Vinogradov’s frank diagnosis angered Stalin, who could not become a pensioner without risking retaliation by whoever became his successor. The diagnosis of permanent debility might induce his subordinates to gang up on him. (He had certainly given them excuse.) Vinogradov was thrown into the Lubyanka in November. The medical care of the Leader could come at a high price for his doctors.³

Stalin did not disregard his health problems. From the mid-1920s he had taken lengthy summer vacations by the Black Sea, relying on letters and telegrams to keep contact with politics in the Kremlin. Even when on holiday, he went on giving general instructions to his highest subordinates. The vacations got longer after 1945. In 1949 he spent three months in his residences in the south; in both 1950 and 1951 his sojourns in Abkhazia lasted nearly five months.⁴

He was trying to prolong life and career by mixing Black Sea leisure with long-distance rule. In 1936 he had had a dacha built for himself at Kholodnaya Rechka north of Gagra on the Abkhazian coast. It was a thick-walled stone structure designed by his court architect Miron Merzhanov. It had a dining room, meeting room, billiard room, tea room and several bedrooms — both upstairs and downstairs — and bathrooms. (In fact Stalin went on sleeping on a divan in preference to his many beds.)⁵ The emphasis was on Soviet stolidity rather than luxury. The only imports were the German shower fittings and the Italian billiard table. Although the carpets were of better quality than any obtainable in Soviet shops, they were poorer than those sold in the Tbilisi markets of his boyhood. He ordered wood panelling throughout the dacha, and the walls of each room were covered with a variety of varnished timber. Apart from the billiard room, Stalin’s main self-indulgence was a long gallery with a film projector and a screen foldable out from the wall. Water was pumped up from the stream at the bottom of the valley immediately to the south. The dacha’s external walls (and this was also true of his daughter’s adjacent dacha) were painted camouflage green.⁶

Slow on his feet, by the early 1950s Stalin looked like a gargoyle which had dropped off the guttering of a medieval church. His face had a gloomy pallor. His hair had long ago turned the grey of weather-beaten sandstone. No longer holding receptions for distinguished foreign guests, he ceased again to bother about his appearance. His clothes were shabbier than ever. Stalin lived as he pleased. Fir trees masked the buildings from view. Whenever he was in residence, fifteen hundred guards maintained his privacy and security. He alone slept in the residential part of the dacha,⁷ and he habitually left the choice of bedroom till the last moment for fear of being assassinated.

Stalin liked working in the afternoon and at night; nothing would change in his routine until he finally collapsed in 1953. He never learned to swim and seldom descended the 826 steps to the road by the coast. His place of pleasure was the garden. At Kholodnaya Rechka he could distract himself from the political concerns that bothered his waking hours. From the balcony at the garden’s edge he could gaze at the Black Sea, calm and almost waveless in the late summer months. Fancying himself as a gardener, he planted lemon and eucalyptus trees in front of the house. The lemon tree was the only plant to survive the bitter winter of 1947–8; it remains there to this day.⁸ In his Abkhazian dachas he could make his political calculations without fuss. He could also enjoy the kind of Caucasus he wanted for himself. This was a Caucasus without the bright human diversity and hectic activity of the towns of Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan or Abkhazia. At Kholodnaya Rechka or up by Lake Ritsa there was nothing but the dachas, the mountains, the sky and the sea. This was a controlled, secluded Caucasus where the only intrusions were those which he told Poskrëbyshev and Vlasik to allow.

Whether restoring himself in the south or relaxing at Blizhnyaya, Stalin strove to keep his decline a secret. He weighed himself regularly. He swallowed pills and iodine capsules — without medical supervision — to perk himself up.⁹ He took the waters at the Black Sea spas and enjoyed occasional saunas in Moscow (which he regarded as equivalent to physical exercise: he had long given up active recreations). Stalin made it a point of pride on ceremonial occasions to ascend the Mausoleum steps on Red Square briskly before waving to the crowd.¹⁰ Soviet citizens were encouraged to believe that the country’s ruler remained hale and hearty. Stalin himself poked fun at those in his entourage who had let themselves go physically. He baited Khrushchëv and Malenkov for their corpulence. He ridiculed others on grounds of taste. Bulganin’s goatee beard amused him. He laughed at Beria for refusing to wear a tie even though he himself would never wear one; he also objected to Beria’s pince-nez: ‘It makes you look like a Menshevik. Only a little chain is needed to complete the picture!’¹¹

Age failed to soften his temper. Whenever he admitted he was feeling his age, his underlings protested that he was simply indispensable. But he went on mooting the possibility of stepping down from power despite his brutal treatment of Vinogradov for making that very suggestion. In 1946 he had told Politburo members to think about how to prepare the next generation to take power. According to Kaganovich, he also expressed a wish to retire. Molotov was his intended replacement: ‘Let Vyacheslav do the work.’¹² This caused consternation: Kaganovich did not like the prospect of yielding to Molotov. Yet Stalin’s favour, once given, could anyway be withdrawn. He played like a cat with the Politburo mice. In 1947 he told each of its members to select five or six subordinates who might eventually replace them. Mikoyan supplied the required list of names while arguing that the individuals were being promoted too early. There was no incentive for veterans to be helpful to newcomers; indeed they could have been forgiven for deliberately obstructing them, and this is probably what happened. Within a year the newcomers, their inexperience having been exposed, were eased out of office.¹³ They could count themselves lucky they were still alive.

While teasing his leading subordinates, however, Stalin genuinely wished to shed many burdens; in particular, he delegated the routine management of the Soviet economy and administrative order to subordinates. He cut down the number of days he received visitors from 145 in the last year of the war to thirty-seven in 1952.¹⁴ But he was determined to remain Leader.¹⁵ He not only retained oversight of general policy but also reserved the capacity to intervene in particular affairs at his whim; and ailing though he was, he never let any great decision on international relations be taken without him. He continued to receive piles of papers from Moscow while he stayed by the Black Sea. Security police affairs remained one of his preoccupations.¹⁶ Always he was accompanied by Alexander Poskrëbyshev, the head of the Special Department of the Secretariat of the Party Central Committee. Poskrëbyshev had been awarded the rank of major-general in the war and Stalin liked to josh him by addressing him as ‘Supreme Commander’.¹⁷ Their master-and-dog relationship was crucial for Stalin. Poskrëbyshev dealt with the telegrams coming to the dacha and decided which ones needed Stalin’s attention. If an emergency arose, Poskrëbyshev was empowered to interrupt his master’s dinner regardless of other guests and consult him about the desirable response.¹⁸

On his lengthy Abkhazian sojourns Stalin kept a lavish table ready for visitors. Most of them were politicians from Moscow or the Caucasus. Conversations were held on a wide variety of topics. His dinners and late breakfasts remained a fulcrum of his despotism. He used them to deliberate with his associates, to give precedence to one or other of them and to strike fear and incite jealousy among the rest. Among the accepted traditions from the late 1940s were elaborate toasts to his health and to his achievements. It was thought impolite to fail to stress his crucial part in preparing the USSR for the Second World War and in leading it to victory in 1945. At each dacha he arranged for a bounteous supply of wines, brandy and champagne; he also kept a store of cigars and cigarettes. Stalin, a lifelong pipe-smoker, remained partial to a puff on a cigarette.¹⁹ He especially liked the company of young local officials and was an eager raconteur of his early life. In his declining years, especially in the presence of new acquaintances, he could not resist embroidering the stories with fanciful exaggeration; and his charm and sense of humour captivated them.

These younger men of party and government avidly ascertained his desires. Abkhazian party boss Akaki Mgeladze asked Stalin about his preferences in wine. Among red wines the Leader mentioned his favourite as Khvanchkara produced by peasant methods. This surprised Mgeladze, who had assumed that Stalin would go for the renowned Atenuri or Khidistavi of his native Gori. (Georgians are proud of the grapes of the locality where they are brought up.) Stalin explained that it was really for Molotov’s benefit that he stocked Khidistavi. His other favoured red wine was Chkhaveri.²⁰ For breakfast he took a simple porridge in a milky bouillon; for lunch and dinner he preferred soups and fish — unusually for a man of the Caucasus he had no great longing for meat.²¹ He adored bananas (and he got very cantankerous when presented with ones of inferior quality).²² When everything was prepared, he played host in the Georgian manner and often dispensed altogether with servants. Guests served themselves from a buffet. Drinks were set out on adjacent small tables.²³

The mischievous aspects of Stalin’s dinner parties persisted. Vodka was poured into glasses instead of wine. Sometimes pepper would surreptitiously be shaken into someone’s dish. It was not just horseplay. As before, Stalin wanted to keep people on edge. He loved it if a drink-sodden guest blurted out something indiscreet. He wanted to have dirt on everybody.²⁴ Yet he could also behave with gallantry. When the Georgian actor Bagashvili opined that Beria’s wife Nina needed to escape ‘her gilded cage’, Beria declined to react despite the implication that she was living a life deprived of dignity. She felt and looked insulted. Stalin understood her reaction. Crossing the room he took her hand. ‘Nina,’ he said, ‘this is the first time I have kissed a woman’s hand.’ Beria received a marital reprimand that evening and Stalin had earned an angry woman’s gratitude.²⁵ He may well have been acting hypocritically; but if so, his behaviour was effective; and since he was a man of despotic power, he was usually given the benefit of the doubt by those he sought to charm.

Yet steadily Stalin rid himself of those who had been his intimates since the mid-1930s. Even Vlasik was sacked in April 1952 and Poskrë-byshev in January 1953. Another target for Stalin was Beria. Ostensibly the two were on fine terms. Stalin honoured him in 1951 by entrusting him with the main address on Red Square at the October Revolution anniversary celebrations. Beria suspected that Stalin was up to no good. What worried him was the Leader’s remark that he did not need to show him the text of the address in advance.²⁶

Beria surmised he was being set up to say something that could be used against him. He knew Stalin’s methods only too well, and events quickly proved that he was right to be circumspect. Two days after the anniversary parade, a Central Committee resolution denounced a ‘Mingrelian nationalist group’. Beria was not named in the resolution, but his Mingrelian origin exposed him to further action — and indeed the resolution specified that a Paris-based Menshevik organisation led by Yevgeni Gegechkori, who was the uncle of Beria’s wife, was running an espionage network in Georgia.²⁷ The Mingrelians are a people with a language so distinct from ‘standard’ Georgian that Stalin had never understood it.²⁸ (This, of course, did nothing to allay his newly developed suspicions about them.) Beria had several of them among his political clients, and — with Stalin’s consent — he had given land to Mingrelians in Abkhazia at the expense of the Abkhazians. As arrests of prominent Mingrelians proceeded in the winter of 1951–2, Beria anticipated that he would soon join them. Although Stalin had stopped the purge by spring 1952, Beria noted that he was usually more polite than amicable. These were unpleasant omens. The former head of the NKVD feared that he might return to the Lubyanka in circumstances not of his choosing.²⁹

In September several Kremlin doctors were arrested, the first of many. This followed a confidential denunciation of the treatment of Andrei Zhdanov, who had died in 1948. The writer was Dr Lidia Timashuk. Her denunciation, sent soon after Zhdanov’s demise, was pulled out of the archives and used as grounds for a purge of the medical professors in the Kremlin Clinic. Pravda published an article exposing ‘the assassins in white coats’. This caused panic in the elite of the medical profession. Professor Yevdokimov, Stalin’s dental physician and for many years the Kremlin head of maxillofacial and oral surgery, stayed away from home for a week in case the police came for him.³⁰

Yevdokimov returned to his apartment exhausted. Probably he had worked out that the authorities wanted to arrest doctors of Jewish origin. Most victims had surnames appearing to indicate they were Jews. ‘Rootless cosmopolitanism’ was routinely denounced with rising intensity. Jews across the Soviet Union were persecuted. They were sacked from positions of responsibility. They were vilified at work. Anti-semitic jibes on the streets became common and no one was called to account. It required courage for anyone to defend the victims. The campaign, which was never officially designated as being aimed at Jewish citizens, gathered force. Many leading Jews were taken into police custody. Solomon Mikhoels, a leader of the USSR’s Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (formed in the Second World War), was killed in a car crash on Stalin’s orders in 1948; the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was disbanded and the rest of its leadership was arrested and shot.³¹ But Molotov’s wife Polina Zhemchuzhina, who had been in detention and exile since 1949, was still alive. She was picked as a Jew who might be put at the centre of a forthcoming show trial. Security police resumed their interrogation of her. Rumours grew that measures were being prepared to deport all Soviet Jews to the Jewish Autonomous Region set up in Birobidzhan in eastern Siberia in 1928 (when Stalin and the Politburo had at last come to the conclusion that those Jews of the USSR who wished to retain their ancestral culture should have a territory of their own).

Whether Stalin really intended the universal deportation of Jews in the early 1950s remains unknown, though this is widely treated as a fact; and no conclusive proof has come to light.³² Yet the situation was developing fast. No Jew in the USSR could feel safe. The presentiment of pogroms grew. Kaganovich, being of Jewish ancestry, felt edgy. Perhaps Stalin would have spared him from implication in the Doctors’ Plot. But the precedents were not encouraging. Once purges started, there was no telling where they might end. Already Molotov and Mikoyan had been cast down from on high. With Zhemchuzhina in prison, Molotov had long feared the worst. Both Molotov and Mikoyan had been removed from their leading posts even though they remained Politburo members. But the writing was on the wall for them. Favour, once withdrawn, was seldom given again.

When he came to finalising arrangements for the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952, Stalin had surprises in store. A Central Committee plenum was held in August. This gave him the chance to take the measure of the entire party and governmental leadership, and he did not fail to encourage individuals to criticise each other’s draft directives before they were passed to the Congress. This was also an opportunity for rising young leaders to catch his eye. Among them was Mikhail Pervukhin, already Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Two weeks later Stalin phoned him early on Sunday morning. He asked Pervukhin why he had proposed amendments to the directives at the Central Committee plenum rather than at the Council of Ministers. Pervukhin explained that he felt obstructed by the fact that the directives had already been decided in the Bureau of the Council of Ministers. To Stalin this smelled like conspiracy, especially when he learned that Beria, Malenkov and Bulganin took it in turns to chair the Bureau. Always he sought to break up coalitions among his subordinates. Malenkov and Bulganin remained in his good books but Stalin left nothing to chance. On his instructions the outspoken Pervukhin was promoted to membership of the Bureau.³³

Stalin then asked the chastened Malenkov to deliver the Central Committee’s political report. He himself was too frail. Not since 1925 had anyone but Stalin discharged this task. When Kaganovich asked him about this, Stalin artfully replied that he needed to ‘promote the young’.³⁴ This, too, was scarcely good news for Kaganovich; but it was worse for Molotov and Mikoyan. At the meeting to plan the proceedings, Stalin proposed excluding them from the Congress Presidium as being ‘non-active members of the Politburo’. When listeners took this as a joke, Stalin insisted that he meant what he said.³⁵ At the Congress itself Stalin said little, contenting himself with pleasing his audience by sitting in a prominent place on the platform. Policies already in place were confirmed by the eulogies of speakers. Yet divergences in the Politburo were detectable to the ears of the better-informed delegates. Malenkov spoke for light industry, Beria for the non-Russians and Khrushchëv for agriculture. All this was done in Aesopian language. On the surface it was made to seem that Stalin and the Politburo were as close in their opinions as two coats of paint.

His subordinates of course knew he was not gaga and had not attended the Congress just to be its political ornament: he was also listening and watching like a bird of prey. Stalinist conservatism was the order of the day. Failure to go along with the ceremonial plaudits for the policies of party and government would have been suicidal. Malenkov’s report stepped wholly over the threshold of realism with his claim that the problem of grain supplies in the USSR had been solved ‘definitively and for ever’. But such a trespass was safer for a speaker than the slightest sign of dissent.

The Central Committee plenum after the Congress on 16 October 1952 heard Stalin’s last oral salvo. Accompanied by the other leaders, he entered the Sverdlov Hall to an ovation. He made a speech lasting an hour and half; he did this without notes and fixed his audience with a searching gaze.³⁶ His main theme, undeclared, was himself. He implied he was not long for this life. He reminisced about the dangers of early 1918 when enemies beset the infant Soviet state on all sides: ‘And what about Lenin? As regards Lenin, go and re-read what he said and what he wrote at that time. In that incredibly grievous situation he went on roaring. He roared and feared nobody. He roared, roared, roared!’³⁷ Talking about Lenin, he was really describing himself and his contribution to the Revolution. ‘Once I’ve been entrusted with it [a task], I carry it out. And not so that I should get all the credit. I wasn’t brought up like that.’³⁸ When a Central Committee member proudly affirmed that he was Stalin’s pupil, Stalin interjected: ‘We are all pupils of Lenin!’³⁹ This was the nearest he came to leaving behind a political testament. Rather than bequeath recommendations on specific policies, he itemised the qualities needed by the Soviet leadership after his death. They included courage, fearlessness, personal modesty, endurance and Leninism.

His immediate aim was to expose the weaknesses of some potential successors. Unlike Lenin, he unstopped the bottles of his wrath as he poured insults on the heads of his victims. Molotov and Mikoyan were the main casualties. Stalin ranted on with accusations of cowardice and inconsistency, alleging that their trips to the USA had given them an exaggerated admiration of American economic strength. He recalled incidents when Molotov had wanted to soften the demand for grain supplies from the kolkhozes. Molotov took his dressing down without replying. Mikoyan, however, decided that active defence was called for, and he took the lectern to respond.⁴⁰ Politburo members already knew of Stalin’s hostility to Molotov and Mikoyan, but it was news for other leading members.

The scenario was close to completion for a final settling of accounts. Molotov, Mikoyan and Beria lived in dread. The Central Committee set up a Presidium as its main executive organ instead of the Politburo. Stalin read out the list of proposed members. The entire list was accepted without discussion.⁴¹ The new Party Presidium was to have an internal Bureau, and neither Molotov nor Mikoyan was appointed to it.⁴² (Beria gained a place, but this was no serious consolation; he knew that Stalin had often worked with a salami-slicer when starting a purge.) When the Presidium met on 18 October, Malenkov was put in charge of its permanent commission on foreign affairs, Bulganin was to supervise ‘questions of defence’ and Shepilov was to head the commission on ‘ideological questions’.⁴³ Old though he was, Stalin still had applied himself to reading reports, plotting his manoeuvres and attending crucial meetings — and, as in 1937, he passed up the opportunity to take a vacation that whole year. The Bureau met six times in the remaining weeks of 1952 and Stalin attended on each occasion.⁴⁴ Much of the proceedings centred on personnel postings. But there was also discussion of business of a distinctly sinister nature. Stalin raised the question ‘of sabotage in medical work’; he also required a report ‘about the situation in the MGB of the USSR’.⁴⁵

Stalin desired to bind an official party organ behind the wagon of his conspiracy. The risk of a coup against him needed to be reduced. By moving slowly and obtaining formal sanction for each stage of the way, he also hoped to convince the younger and therefore less experienced Bureau members that his measures were based on solid evidence. The killer needed to secure his alibi and his legendary guile had not left him.

His veteran accomplices were shivering with trepidation. Not only Beria but also Malenkov, Khrushchëv and Bulganin knew from experience that they could not assume that Stalin would not eventually pick them off too. He could not be trusted: that much was obvious to everybody. Things were getting bad. On 21 December 1952 Molotov and Mikoyan, after much vacillation, decided to go out to Stalin’s Blizhnyaya dacha to greet him on his birthday. They had done this for many years and, although he had recently shown hostility to them, they thought the hostility might increase if they broke the custom. They were mistaken. The visit annoyed Stalin, and the other Presidium members advised Molotov and Mikoyan to keep out of his sight.⁴⁶ Yet still his entire demeanour baffled as well as scared everyone. Plainly he was not the person he once had been. After his death his associates were to remark on a psychological as well as a physical deterioration in him. They noted the onset of an unpredictability which they called ‘capricious’. Previously he had stayed fairly loyal to the group of leaders he had established in the late 1930s; the Leningrad Affair of 1949–50 had been the exception, not the rule, in the post-war years.⁴⁷ But he had come to proffer or withdraw favour with an arbitrariness that terrified them.

So what was the Leader up to? Was there a great plan behind the moves he was making? Would the elimination of several veterans — and the persecution of all Jews — mark the end of any projected purge? Could such a purge be carried through to its end by a man whose physical decline was unmistakable? To his close associates, whether or not they had been denounced by him, there appeared no point in guessing about precise motives. Stalin had been killing fellow politicians for many years. He had not lost the habit with the onset of decrepitude.

54. DEATH AND EMBALMING

As 1952 was drawing to a close, Stalin held a birthday party in the large reception room at his Blizhnyaya dacha on 21 December.¹ The Boss was intent on having a good time and had invited the leading politicians. His daughter Svetlana was also present. Pictures of Soviet children covered the walls. Stalin had also arranged for paintings of scenes from the works of Gorki and Sholokhov to be pinned up.² Much drink was consumed. The gramophone played folk and dance music all night long, and Stalin was in charge of the choice of discs. It was a merry occasion.

Yet two guests looked glum. One was Khrushchëv, who hated having to dance and called himself ‘a cow on ice’. Mischievously Stalin called upon him to perform the energetic Ukrainian gopak. Perhaps the Boss, who as a boy failed to master the lekuri,³ derived perverse satisfaction from his embarrassment. The other person who did not enjoy the evening was Svetlana. At the age of twenty-six, already twice married and a mother, she could not stand being told what to do and rejected his request for a dance with her. His shortened arm usually inhibited Stalin from taking to the floor but he had had a glass or two that evening. When Svetlana demurred he flew into a rage. Grabbing her ginger hair, he dragged her forward. Her face turned red and her eyes filled with tears of pain and humiliation. Other guests felt for her but could do nothing. Khrushchëv, still smarting from his own embarrassment, never forgot the scene: ‘[Stalin] shuffled around with his arms spread out. It was evident that he had never danced before.’ But he did not judge Stalin harshly. ‘He behaved so brutishly not because he wanted to cause hurt to Svetlana. No, his behaviour toward her was really an expression of affection, but in the perverse, brutish form that was peculiar to him.’⁴

Other revellers worried about something a lot worse than being yanked by the hair on to a dance floor. The probable imminence of a political purge agitated all of them. Pravda on 13 January 1953 published an editorial on ‘Evil Spies and Murderers Masked as Medical Professors’. Stalin had edited the text.⁵ Although he stayed all this time at Blizhnyaya, he was no mere spectator of the complex political drama.⁶ Members of the Party Presidium — as the Politburo had been redesignated — read Pravda with their hearts in their mouths. The tension was reaching breaking point. On 28 February Stalin invited Malenkov, Beria, Khrush-chëv and Bulganin to watch a film with him at the dacha. Stalin was as welcoming a host as ever. Food and drink were lavish. Party Presidium members, after a skinful of Georgian wine, tried to avoid saying anything that might annoy the Leader. When dinner was over, Stalin told the servants to open the cinema facility in the ground-floor gallery. The party broke up at four o’clock in the morning of 1 March.⁷ None of the departing grandees recalled that Stalin looked ill. According to Khrushchëv, they left him well oiled and on good form.⁸ This was to be expected after a long night of carousing.

As the limousines of his visitors departed into the darkness of the Moscow countryside, Stalin gave a quick instruction to his guards. One of them, Pavel Lozgachëv, reported the contents to his chief Ivan Khrustalëv. Stalin had announced that he was going to bed and that they could go off duty and sleep; he had also ordered that the guards should not disturb him until such time as he called them into his rooms.⁹

From mid-morning on 1 March disquiet grew among the guards when they came on duty because Stalin failed to beckon them inside. The routine had been in place for years. A group known as the mobile security team patrolled Blizhnyaya dacha. Each guard’s shift alternated between two hours on duty and two hours’ rest so as to maintain alertness. The guards’ positions around the dacha were designated by numbers.¹⁰ Stalin’s unusual ban on disturbing him stayed in force, and yet they all knew that they would get the blame if something untoward had happened. His habit was to ask for a glass of tea with a slice of lemon in the late morning. He was as regular as clockwork. Deputy commander Mikhail Starostin became nervous that no such request had been made.¹¹ There was no higher authority at the dacha to turn to. Poskrëbyshev and Vlasik were no longer in post and it was unclear who in the Party Presidium, if anybody, could and would countermand a personal order given by Stalin. This was a situation which had worked to Stalin’s advantage when he was fit. He was about to pay a fatal price for his extraordinary concentration of power.

At 6.30 p.m. a light was switched on in the dacha. The patrolling guards were relieved at this sign of life, surmising that all must be well with the Leader. They assumed that, after getting up late, he was tending to his mass of duties. Yet Stalin failed to emerge from his room. He neither called for food nor gave commands for anything to be done. No one caught a glimpse of him. The guards therefore remained perplexed about what they should do next. At around 10 p.m. a package arrived for Stalin from the Central Committee offices in Moscow. This forced the security group to make a decision. After an exchange of opinions it was resolved that Pavel Lozgachëv should take the package to Stalin. Nervously entering the room, he came upon a shocking scene. Stalin was slumped on the floor. Although he had not quite lost consciousness, he could not speak and had wet himself. Evidently he had had a stroke. Stalin’s wristwatch lay on the floor next to him showing the time at half-past six. The guards reasonably guessed that Stalin had fallen over at that earlier moment in the evening when he had put on the light.¹²

No one dared do the most obvious thing and call a doctor. Needing an instruction from higher authority, the guards phoned Minister of State Security Sergei Ignatev in Moscow. Even Ignatev felt out of his depth and phoned Malenkov and Beria. Everyone at the dacha frantically wished to receive orders. All they did on their own initiative was to lift Stalin from the floor and move him on to his divan and place a blanket over him.¹³

Receiving Ignatev’s news from Malenkov, Presidium members wondered whether Stalin’s final demise was at hand. But exactly how they acted is still an unsolved riddle. Not only Stalin’s fellow politicians but also his guards kept their mouths shut for many years about the episode — and memories deteriorated with the passage of time. The vicissitudes of the struggle for the political succession also had a distorting effect on the records. The victor was Khrushchëv. Beria was executed in December 1953 and Malenkov, on losing to Khrushchëv, was not inclined to record his testimony. Khrushchëv and Svetlana Allilueva were left as the only witnesses who could freely give their accounts before old age dimmed their memories. Unfortunately neither Khrushchëv nor Allilueva was averse to fantasising to exaggerate their knowledge and virtue. It was a paradoxical situation. Stalin himself had rigidly regulated the issuance of details about his life; their scantiness and unreliability were extreme. Yet the provision of those details became even less dependable from the day he lost that control. Dates, procedures, personalities and events are as clear as a barrel of tar for the period from 28 February to 5 March 1953.

The fullest account came from Khrushchëv. According to him, several of them went out to the dacha in the early hours of 2 March. Supposedly these included Malenkov, Beria, Bulganin and Khrushchëv. It is not certain whether or not they — or some of them — made a second visit before deciding to call for medical assistance.¹⁴ For whatever reason, it was hours before doctors were summoned to care for Stalin. The precise time of their advent is in dispute. Svetlana, who had been summoned from a French language class,¹⁵ put it at 10 a.m. in her memoir; but the more plausible account by the guard A. I. Rybin, who was there at the time, put it at 7 a.m.¹⁶ In any case it is clear that Presidium members were not quick to arrange for such assistance. This gave rise to the suspicion that they deliberately let Stalin’s condition deteriorate. It is a possibility since all of them were potential purge victims. But perhaps his political subordinates were simply too scared to intervene any earlier. If he recovered, they would pay a heavy price for acting as if they were in charge of the country. This is a credible hypothesis. Yet they were surely dilatory to a culpable extent — and perhaps they were already more aware of the chronic nature of his ill health than they let on.

The doctors found Stalin drenched in his urine. They undressed and wiped him clean with a vinegar-based solution. At some point he vomited blood; Cheynes-Stokes respiration ensued with its characteristic gasping and irregularity. The seriousness of his condition was obvious. The medical experts themselves were functioning under the stress of knowing what happened to doctors who failed to satisfy Soviet politicians. They quickly found out the worst. Stalin’s right extremities were totally paralysed. Although they did what they could, his prospects were poor. Before midday they administered enemas, even though no one seriously anticipated a positive effect.¹⁷

The problem for the Presidium was that, if Stalin recovered, they could be damned if they had failed to assist his recovery and damned if they had intervened without his permission. Caution was vital. It was clearly essential to discover more about his condition. Unfortunately, after the Doctors’ Plot arrests, the finest medical expertise in Moscow was to be found in the cells of the Lubyanka. What followed was a tragicomedy. The incarcerated professors (who allegedly were among the most evil traitors) were approached and asked the likely consequences for a patient diagnosed as having Cheynes–Stokes respiration. After weeks of torture they were bewildered by the unusual turn taken by their interrogators. Yakov Rappoport answered concisely that this was a very ‘grave symptom’, implying that death was the likeliest result.¹⁸ Whether medical steps were taken on the basis of such information is not known. But Presidium members had at least gained the assurance that they were free to plan for the political succession. The evidence of their eyes was anyway pretty conclusive: Stalin was in a ghastly condition and the doctors attending him were clearly pessimistic. Now the country’s most distinguished physicians, held in the Lubyanka, had independently confirmed their impression.

On 4 March they started to make their arrangements. There was no procedural tradition and no rules; Stalin had studiously kept the matter off the agenda. The main leaders sensed that legitimacy would accrue to them only if they could pretend to continuity, and they convoked an emergency session of the Party Central Committee. This enabled the Presidium veterans to bypass the threat from the members promoted since the Nineteenth Congress in October 1952. Some veterans were better placed than others. Molotov could not claim supreme power after Stalin’s attack on him in October 1952. Malenkov and Beria took the initiative. Flanked by the Presidium veterans (with the exception of Bulganin, who was on duty by Stalin’s bedside), Malenkov opened the session by announcing that Stalin was seriously ill and that the prognosis was poor even were he to survive the current medical crisis. The Central Committee listened silently and anxiously. Then the lectern was ceded to Beria, who proposed that Malenkov should take over Stalin’s post as Chairman of the Council of Ministers with immediate effect. This was agreed and the short session was declared closed.¹⁹

Yet Stalin had not yet passed away and Presidium members sped back to Blizhnyaya dacha where he was sinking irretrievably. They were watching their past lives flash before their eyes: the Five-Year Plans, the Great Terror and the Great Patriotic War. Stalin personified their collective career. They had been active in the consolidation of the Soviet state, its military and industrial power as well as its territorial expansion and political security. With the possible exception of Beria, they were in awe of Stalin’s intelligence and experience at the same time as they simply feared him. He had bewitched them even while traumatising them. As he lay prostrate on the divan, they could not be confident that by some superhuman effort he would not revive and return to dominate public life again. These very individuals who had sent millions to their deaths in the Gulag under Stalin’s leadership trembled at the sight of an old man, semi-conscious and inert, whose life was slipping away. To the end he held them in thrall. There was still the possibility that he might recover sufficiently, if only for a moment, to order the destruction of all of them. Even a dying Stalin was not to be trifled with.

At the dacha the tension was intense. Beria, taking charge of security, put the zone around Blizhnyaya into quarantine as a watch was kept on the patient. On the morning of 5 March he again vomited blood.²⁰ As the doctors later discovered, he had suffered a massive stomach haemorrhage. His general health had been poor for years and his arteries were hardened. Medical staff and politicians gathered at his bedside. Svetlana was the only close family member at the dacha. Turns were taken by those present to approach his recumbent body to pay their respects. They took his hand looking for some sign of his intentions toward them. Most remarkable was the behaviour of Beria, who slobbered on Stalin’s hand in an unctuous display of personal fidelity. At 9.50 a.m. the Leader choked on his last breath. He was gone.

Some fell into each other’s arms. The distraught Svetlana took comfort in the embrace of Khrushchëv. Servants were allowed in to see the corpse. Even the Presidium members, who hours previously had been making dispositions for politics after Stalin, were affected. A whole period in their lives as well as in their country’s history had been terminated. They would not have been human if they had not been shocked by their experience. Only one person had full presence of mind. This was Beria, who behaved like an uncaged panther. No longer unctuous or doleful, he shouted: ‘Khrustalëv! The car!’²¹ Beria raced to the Kremlin to complete an orderly political succession in which he would play a leading role. While others consoled Svetlana or wept by Stalin’s bedside, there was much to do and Beria set the pace. Unlike Molotov and Mikoyan, he had not been named as an undesirable potential leader. The Mingrelian Affair had not been mentioned at the Central Committee and, as far as its members knew, Beria had been in Stalin’s good books to the end. The battle for the succession was under way.

The security group became the guard of honour standing by the dead Leader. A black catafalque arrived at the dacha and the guards carried him into it for transfer to the special institute where the condition of Lenin’s corpse was regularly checked and Stalin’s corpse would be prepared for the funeral. Guard commander Khrustalëv remained in charge.

At 8 p.m. on 5 March the Party Central Committee reconvened with Khrushchëv in the chair. Presidium members knew they had to convince everyone present that Stalin had died of natural causes.²² The platform was given to USSR Minister of Health A. F. Tretyakov for a detailed medical explanation. Khrushchëv, avoiding debate, announced the proposals from the Bureau of the Presidium. Malenkov was suggested as Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Beria would be one of his First Deputies and would take charge of the Ministries of Internal Affairs (MVD) and State Security (MGB). Khrushchëv would remain a Secretary of the Party Central Committee. The older veterans were not ignored. Voroshilov was to be made Chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet. Molotov, who retained his standing in the minds of fellow leaders despite Stalin’s attack on him, would become First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers (as did not only Beria but also Bulganin). The key figures, however, were Malenkov, Beria and Khrush-chëv. This was signalled in the decision to entrust them with the task of bringing Stalin’s papers ‘into necessary order’. Every proposal was unanimously approved and the meeting lasted only forty minutes.²³ Stalin’s specific wishes were being repudiated. He had been plotting the downfall of Beria as well as Molotov and Mikoyan. Malenkov, however, saw Beria as a useful ally and Khrushchëv temporarily accepted the fait accompli.

Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchëv had known Stalin in the years when he held the power of life or death over them. They had no experience of politics free of fear that he might order their arrest. Beria got his son Sergo to train as a pilot and learn the international air routes in case the family needed to flee.²⁴ Beria, Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan and Kaganovich had reason to bless Stalin’s parting with this earthly life. Others such as Khrushchëv and Malenkov must have worried that Stalin’s menace might eventually be directed at them too. The entire Presidium had shivered with fear for months. Stalin’s closest subordinates had plenty of interest in his demise and in conspiring to hasten its occurrence. The reasons for death remain obscure. Although an autopsy was carried out, the report has never been found. This would be more than enough to induce suspicions. Furthermore, the ten doctors who cared for him at the end composed a history of his illness. Yet it was not completed until July (and has only recently become available).²⁵ Its plausible conclusion was that Stalin died of natural causes. But the delay in composition was odd, as was the loss of the autopsy document: perhaps something important was being covered up.

The verdict must remain open. One possibility is that he was murdered, probably with the connivance of Beria and Khrustalëv. Poison administered in Stalin’s food is the method usually touted; another suggestion is that Beria arranged for his men to enter the dacha and kill the Leader with a lethal injection. In one strange version it is alleged that the man who died at the Blizhnyaya house was not Stalin but his double; but this too is far-fetched speculation entirely without evidence (and indeed without an explanation of why, if the corpse belonged to a double, Stalin did not return to wreak vengeance on the plotters).

The corpse was carried to the institute’s first floor on a stretcher and medical staff took over from guards who were still in a shocked condition — many were in tears. Khrustalëv alone stayed as the other guards went back downstairs to the vestibule. Stalin’s false teeth were removed and given to the guard commander for safekeeping. Like Lenin, Stalin was to be embalmed. He had complicated this task in 1952 by arresting Boris Zbarski, who had been in charge of the Mausoleum laboratory for many years.²⁶ But the chemistry had long ago been recorded for others to use. Meanwhile Stalin’s corpse was laid out in a catafalque on Red Square.²⁷ The same guards accompanied the body to the Hall of Columns down from Red Square, where it stayed until the day of the funeral.²⁸ The order was given to convert the Lenin Mausoleum into a joint resting place for both Lenin and Stalin. There was nothing unexpected about this, even though Stalin had given no instructions. For two decades he had been hailed as the greatest living human being. The Presidium simply assumed that his corpse should receive the same treatment as Stalin had organised for Lenin in 1924.

Radio and newspapers announced his death on 6 March. The popular shock was immense since no prior intimation of his physical collapse had been given; and indeed there had been no comment in previous years about the general decline in his health. Crowds gathered. Muscovites raced to catch a glimpse of the dictator’s remains before the funeral. Trains and buses from distant provinces were packed with passengers avid to see Stalin lying in state. By Metro and bus everyone came to the capital’s centre and then walked up on foot to the cobbled square with sombre eagerness. On 8 March the human mass became too large for the police to control. Far too many people were converging from all directions. Panic ensued as many tried to turn back. The result was disastrous. Thousands of individuals were trampled and badly injured, and the number of people who suffered fatal asphyxiation (which was withheld from the newspapers) went into the hundreds. Even in his coffin the Leader had not lost his capacity to deal out death at random to his subjects. There was another aspect to this tragedy: it indicated the limits of state control even in the USSR. Outward obedience to orders was shown most of the time; but the surface of public calm was a brittle one and the MVD was nervous of prohibiting ordinary people from doing what they wanted in the first couple of days after the news was broadcast.

The funeral took place on 9 March. It was a cold, dry, grey day of late winter. The sun did not appear. Frost was heavy.²⁹ The crowds were dense. Short journeys in the capital took several hours. The authorities were caught between wanting to be legitimated by association with his memory and ensuring the preservation of order on the streets. The Imperial regime had become intensely unpopular when thousands of spectators were accidentally trampled to death on Khodynka Field on the day of Nicholas II’s coronation. It would not do to allow a repetition of such an event with the passing of Joseph the Terrible.

Any other outcome than a peaceful ceremony would have sent out the message that Stalin’s successors were unable to rule the country: they had to prove themselves men of steel like the deceased Leader. The catafalque at the Hall of Columns had a side-curtain proclaiming ‘Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!’ Only Stalin’s head and shoulders were left visible. His eyes were closed. Strong searchlights were trained on him. Official photographers were recurrently permitted to approach and record the occasion. Orchestras played. A female choir, dressed in black, sang dirges. At 10.30 a.m. the Party Presidium entered to the accompaniment of the USSR state hymn. Malenkov led the way, partnered by China’s representative Chou En-lai. A gun carriage bore the coffin out of the Hall of Columns up the slope to Red Square where the newly redesignated Lenin–Stalin Mausoleum awaited it. The corpse was removed from the gun carriage and transferred to a bier outside the building. Presidium members and honoured guests moved to the top of the Mausoleum.³⁰ Across Red Square an enormous crowd had assembled. Microphones and amplifiers had been set up to enable all to hear the ceremony. Wreaths were piled high. (The composer Sergei Prokofiev had died on the same day as Stalin and his mourners found the shops empty of flowers because everyone had rushed to pay their respects to the Leader.) The passing of a political era was being marked.

Detachments of the Soviet Army marched across Red Square. The MVD as usual organised security behind the crowd barriers. Military orchestras played the conventional dirges. Hundreds of thousands of Muscovites turned out to pay their last respects; and unlike on May Day or 7 November, when their work-organisations directly compelled them to take part in such ceremonies, the popular eagerness to be present on the historic day was unmistakable.

There were three eulogies. Malenkov, Molotov and Beria gave them from the top of the Mausoleum. Those in proximity to the speakers could detect differences among them: only Molotov’s face betrayed sincere grief. Beria spoke with a brusque dryness (and was later rebuked for this by his wife Nina).³¹ Molotov’s prominence indicated to the politically well informed that tremors were already making themselves felt at the apex of Soviet politics: the corpse of Stalin had hardly cooled before his former leading accomplice had been readmitted to the ruling group. Foreign visitors were not confined to communists. Veteran communist leaders Chou En-lai, Palmiro Togliatti, Dolores Ibárurri and Maurice Thorez had pride of place; but others at the ceremony included Italian socialist leader Pietro Nenni. Condolences poured into Moscow from foreign governments. Stalin’s old negotiating rivals Churchill and Truman sent condolences. Newspapers in the communist countries stressed that the tallest giant of history was no more. In the West the reaction of the press was more diverse. Yet although his crimes against humanity were recorded, few editors wished to leave the occasion unaccompanied by reference to his part in the economic transformation of his country and the victory over the Third Reich. This was a gentler fate than he deserved.

The world communist movement, however, did not question his services to humanity. He who had ordered the construction of the Lenin Mausoleum was about to join the founder of the Soviet Union in death. The embalmers completed their work. His corpse had been gutted and soaked in the liquid whose ingredients remained a secret. A glass cabinet had been commissioned. The internal layout of the rectangular granite structure was rearranged while masons changed its name to the Lenin–Stalin Mausoleum. Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhughashvili, known to history as Stalin, was laid to rest.

55. AFTER STALIN

A tidal wave of reforms crashed over Stalin’s policies in the USSR in the first week of March 1953. His successors were posthumously opposing him after decades of obedience. No member of the Party Presidium favoured the total conservation of his legacy; even communist conservatives like Molotov and Kaganovich approved some sort of innovation. Changes frustrated by Stalin at last became possible. Yet debate did not flood out into society. It was not allowed to. The last thing the ascendant party leaders wanted was to let ordinary Soviet citizens, or even the lower functionaries of the state, influence what was decided in the Kremlin.

Molotov and Kaganovich could not prevent the reform projects of Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchëv. Malenkov wanted to increase payments to collective farms so as to boost agricultural production; he also favoured giving priority to light-industrial investment. Khrushchëv wished to plough up virgin lands in the USSR and end the decades-old uncertainty about supplies of bread. Malenkov and Beria were committed to making overtures to the USA for peaceful coexistence: they feared that the Cold War might turn into a disaster for humanity. Beria desired a rapprochement with Yugoslavia; he also aimed to withdraw privileges for Russians in the USSR and to widen the limits of cultural self-expression. Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchëv agreed that public life should be conducted on a less violent and arbitrary basis than under Stalin. They supported the release of political convicts from the labour camps. Quietly they restrained the official media from delivering the customary grandiose eulogies to Stalin. If his policies were to be replaced, it no longer made sense to go on treating him as a demigod.

The Party Presidium handled his physical legacy with caution. When Lenin had died in 1924, Stalin became the custodian of his writings and decided what should be published and what withheld from view. He published his own Foundations of Leninism. He sought legitimacy for whatever he was doing by reference to the works of Lenin. Stalin’s successors knew this. Sanctioned by the Party Central Committee on 5 March 1953,¹ they commandeered his book collection and distributed most of it anonymously to various public libraries. Only a few hundred books were left with the Institute of Marxism–Leninism. Many of his letters and telegrams were incinerated and most drafts of his articles and books disappeared.² The last edition of his collected works was suspended incomplete.³

Stalin’s desk at the Blizhnyaya dacha held disturbing secrets. It contained three sheets of paper which he had hidden beneath a newspaper inside a drawer. One was a note from Tito:⁴

Thus did one gangster write to another. No one else had stood up to Stalin like this; perhaps this is why he kept the note. He had also conserved the last thing written to him by Bukharin: ‘Koba, why is my death necessary for you?’ Had Stalin wanted a frisson of satisfaction when re-reading it? (It cannot be believed that some distorted feeling of attachment to Bukharin lingered with him.) The third item was the letter dictated by Lenin on 5 March 1922 containing the demand for Stalin to apologise to Krupskaya for his verbal abuse of her. It was his last message from Lenin and it was the most wounding. He would not have conserved it in the desk unless it had echoed round the caverns of his mind.

The party leaders kept the three items a secret. But they changed public discourse after Stalin’s death and Pravda restrained its praise of him. Articles criticised the ‘cult of the individual’. Although these were laden with citations of Stalin’s works, it took no feat of memory to recall that his cult had been the most grandiose in history. While fresh policies were being discussed in the Party Presidium, Beria celebrated his return to the leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs by collecting tape recordings of Stalin’s conversations with the police agencies. The tapes proved that Stalin was plotting terror to the end. Beria arranged for Central Committee members to read the transcripts.⁵

The reformers faced a dilemma: if they advertised any abandonment of Stalin’s legacy, there would be a questioning of their legitimate claim to rule; but if they were slow to alter some policies they might meet trouble for ignoring the discontents of society. There was a further difficulty. Stalin was revered by many of those people — and there were millions of them — who had hated his repressions. The despot still exercised his spell in death. Reformers had to be seen behaving firmly and competently. Signs of panic might ignite a challenge to the whole Soviet order. The majority in the Presidium sought to alter Stalin’s policies without expressly criticising him.⁶ At Party Central Committee meetings they merely alluded to Stalin’s unpredictability and capriciousness in his last years. This happened at the plenum in July 1953 after Beria’s arrest on the trumped-up charge of being a British intelligence agent. Really the leadership feared that Beria was lusting after his own personal supremacy as well as planning reforms which seemed excessively radical. It was Beria, not Stalin, who was held responsible for the past crimes and abuses, and he was executed in December 1953.⁷

Stalin’s family experienced an abrupt change in circumstances. His daughter Svetlana sensibly changed her surname. As a student she had been known as Svetlana Stalina but after his death she called herself Svetlana Allilueva.⁸ By bowing low before her father’s successors, she saved herself from trouble. Vasili Stalin was incapable of such an adjustment. He was notorious for drunken party-going and debauchery. His father virtually disowned him, but only after the Leader’s death was Vasili called to account and arrested for rowdiness and misuse of public funds. His days of privilege were at an end.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs was brought under the party’s control after the fall of Beria. The limits on cultural expression continued to be widened. Malenkov and Khrushchëv carried on promoting reforms while competing for personal supremacy. Prices paid for the harvest to collective farms were raised. The virgin soil of Kazakhstan was ploughed up to increase the volume of agricultural production. A rapprochement took place with Tito’s Yugoslavia. Overtures were made to the USA for a lessening of international tensions. The Korean War was brought to a close. Discussions at the Central Committee became less governed by the need to show unequivocal support for every action of the Party Presidium. Although the USSR remained a one-party dictatorship, the atmosphere of general fear had been lightened. The rivalry between Malenkov and Khrushchëv kept growing. Beria had been feared equally for his reformist radicalism and his personal ruthlessness. Malenkov lacked his panache and Khrushchëv, benefiting from his reputation as the conqueror of Beria, emerged as the supreme leader in the Presidium within a couple of years.

At his instigation a commission examined material on the purges of the Stalin period. Khrushchëv, while searching for damaging evidence about Malenkov, also had a larger agenda. Several Party Presidium members objected to any further reforms. To secure his ascendancy Khrushchëv raised the Stalin question at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956. When comments were made about the danger of destabilising the Soviet order, he retorted: ‘If we don’t tell the truth at the Congress, we’ll still be forced to tell the truth at some time in the future. And then we won’t be the people making the speeches. No, instead we’ll be the people under investigation!’⁹ At a closed session of the Congress he denounced Stalin as a monstrous individual who had sent thousands to their deaths and broken with Leninist traditions in leadership and policy. The charge sheet was not a comprehensive one. Khrushchëv focused his report on Stalin’s activity from Kirov’s death in 1934 onwards. He avoided criticism of the basic political and economic structures set up in the late 1920s, and he said nothing about the terror conducted by Stalin in the Civil War and the First Five-Year Plan. Wanting to ingratiate himself with current party and governmental officials, he gave the impression that their predecessors had been the main victims of the Great Terror of 1937–8.

The Congress audience was stunned into silence. Khrushchëv had achieved his purpose: he had made it difficult for his Soviet opponents to attack his leadership and policies without seeming to advocate a reversion to state terror. Yet there was a problem. It had been Stalin who had established the communist states in Europe’s eastern half. By discrediting Stalin, Khrushchëv reasserted a line of legitimacy in the Soviet Union stretching from Lenin and the October Revolution. This was not the case in eastern Europe, where it was Stalin who had installed communism. Khrushchëv’s report was political dynamite there. Strikers organised protest demonstrations in Poland. By October 1956 a popular revolt had broken out in Hungary.

Opponents of reform struck back in the Party Presidium in June 1957, calling for Khrushchëv’s removal as Party First Secretary. But the Central Committee protected him and, after years of further struggle, he delivered a still more devastating attack on Stalin at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in October 1961. Old Bolshevik Dora Lazurkina was given the podium. Bent with years, Lazurkina told how the shade of Lenin had appeared in a dream to her demanding to rest alone in the Mausoleum on Red Square. This sentiment evoked tumultuous applause. The deed was done at dead of night and Stalin’s embalmed corpse was taken out of the Mausoleum and buried below the Kremlin Wall; a simple bust and pillar were placed above his grave only years later. The historians were ordered to search the archives for proof that Stalin had frequently fallen out with Lenin and always behaved brutally. Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd. The Lenin cult was joined by a growing cult of Khrushchëv. A new party-history textbook appeared in 1959.¹⁰ Those communists who admired Stalin kept quiet or risked expulsion from the party ranks. Only a few communist parties abroad dissented. Chief among them was the Communist Party of China. Mao Tse-tung had resented Stalin in life but thought Khrushchëv’s policies of reform made too great a rupture with the kind of communism espoused by both Stalin and Mao. This contrast added to the tensions, leading to a rift between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China.

Khrushchëv was removed from power in 1964. The Party Politburo (as the Presidium was renamed) ditched the more idiosyncratic of his policies at home and abroad; it also stifled dissenting opinion more harshly than under Khrushchëv. But this was a modification of Khrush-chëv’s programme rather than a reversion to full Stalinism. The new Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev never contemplated terror or individual despotism. ‘Stability of cadres’ became a slogan. Behind the scenes, however, the Politburo seriously considered rehabilitating Stalin’s historical image in 1969 on the occasion of his birthday. A laudatory Pravda editorial was prepared. Only a last-minute intervention by Italian and French communist party leaders prevented publication. (This was too late, however, to stop the Mongolian Communist Party from printing it as Ulan Bator lies in an earlier time zone.)

Yet the desire to rehabilitate Stalin persisted. In July 1984 — less than a year before Mikhail Gorbachëv came to power — the Politburo mulled over the question. The older members retained affection for him and hostility to Khrushchëv:¹¹

At Stalin’s death Ustinov had been Minister for Armaments, Gromyko had been ambassador to the United Kingdom and Tikhonov the Minister of Ferrous Metallurgy.

The idea of rehabilitation came to nothing because Gorbachëv, who had avoided saying anything about Stalin in the Politburo, became Party General Secretary in March 1985. The movement quickened to reseat Stalin on the bench of the accused. The massive scale of his abuses, which had been only partially revealed under Khrushchëv, was described. The ‘administrative-command system’ established by Stalin was denounced. Films, novels and poems as well as historical works pointed in the same direction. Gorbachëv encouraged the intelligentsia to convince society that total repudiation of the Stalinist legacy was vital for the regeneration of Soviet society. The process slipped out of his control as several critics of Stalin insisted that Lenin too was guilty of fundamental abuses. They traced the administrative-command system to the origins of the USSR. Yet this same openness of discussion also allowed some intellectuals to offer praise for Stalin. His role in securing industrialisation in the 1930s and then victory in the Second World War was repeatedly proclaimed.

Yet there was no going back. Gorbachëv went on to castigate Stalin as one of history’s greatest criminals. When the USSR fell apart at the end of 1991 and the Russian Federation became a separate state, Boris Yeltsin continued the damnation of Stalin — and, unlike Gorbachëv, he rejected Lenin and Stalin in equal measure. So things lasted until 2000 when Vladimir Putin became President. Putin’s grandfather had worked in the kitchens for Lenin and Stalin. President Putin was averse to hearing about the abuses of power in the 1930s and 1940s; instead he wished to praise the achievements of the Soviet state in those decades.¹² ‘Denigration’ of the past was frowned upon again. Putin, in a symbolic gesture, restored the old USSR national anthem, albeit with new words. He spoke fondly of his own early career in the KGB, the successor organ to Stalin’s security police agency.¹³ It was not Putin’s purpose to rehabilitate Stalin but rather to affirm the continuities linking the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. This process, though, relieved Stalin’s shade from torment for the first time since the late 1980s. Putin was relegating him to the status of a historical figure and leaving it to the scholars to battle out their verdict. This was the ultimate indignity for the long-dead dictator. So long as he was being posthumously denounced, he remained a living force in Moscow politics. Stalin suffered the ignominy of official neglect.

He was not forgotten, however, in society. Despite the revelations about his despotism, a residual nostalgia remained for Stalin and his period of rule. Surveys of popular opinion in 2000 confirmed this. When asked which period of twentieth-century history they regarded with greatest admiration, most respondents chose the Brezhnev years. Khrush-chëv’s rule attracted the approval of 30 per cent. The Revolution gained 28 and Nicholas II’s reign 18 per cent. Yet Stalin’s despotism, with 26 per cent, did not do badly. Adverse opinion about the despotism was still higher at 48 per cent, but the fact that over a quarter of respondents rejected the case against Stalinist rule was depressing to those in Russian public affairs who aspired to a transformation of social attitudes.¹⁴ Not everyone was kindly towards his memory. Families existed whose members solemnly toasted the health of ‘the American doctor’ Cheyne-Stokes on each anniversary of Stalin’s death. They were recalling the fatal breathing problem diagnosed at Blizhnyaya in March 1953. (In fact there had been two doctors, Cheyne and Stokes, and they were not Americans but Irishmen.)¹⁵ Indeed millions of Soviet citizens regularly spat on his memory while the politicians switched between public semi-denunciation and, at least in many cases, private admiration.

Abroad the decline in his reputation was precipitate and near-universal. The communist order collapsed in eastern Europe in 1989 and in every country no one could speak or write in defence of Stalin without incurring massive public displeasure. In the West most communist parties had long ago disavowed Stalinism. ‘Eurocommunism’ in Italy and Spain had been critical of both Lenin and Stalin since the 1970s. Western communist parties anyway fell apart with the dismantling of the USSR and it was no longer a matter of much interest what they thought about the Stalin period. Even in the People’s Republic of China, where a general respect for Stalin was formally maintained, spokesmen stressed the difficulties he had caused for China’s particular interests. In only one little country were many admirers of Stalin widely to be found. This was in his native Georgia, which regained its independence at New Year 1992. Georgians frequently forgot his maltreatment of their forebears. He was celebrated as a Georgian of worldwide fame who had tamed the Russians and given them a lesson in statecraft — and this was enough to save him from execration. Both his statues and the shrine of his childhood house stand untouched and venerated in Gori. Surviving relatives, especially grandchildren who did not know him personally, tend his cult. Georgia’s veteran communists praise his memory.

This is not a unique fate for homicidal leaders. Genghis Khan is revered in Mongolia. Hitler has admirers in Germany and other countries (including even Russia). People remember what they want in the circumstances in which they do the remembering; they always select and often invent their memories. In Stalin’s case those who think fondly of him — at least many of them — are reacting against the contempt shown towards the achievements of themselves or their parents before 1953. Like Putin, they want to remove the taint on the name of their families. They are also reacting against the unpleasantness of their situation in Russia after communism. They feel that Stalin gave them pride, order and predictability; they overlook the fact that his rule was characterised by systematic oppression. His era has become a reassuring fiction for those individuals and groups who seek a myth for life in the present. Even many persons whose forebears were shot or imprisoned on Stalin’s orders have taken comfort in fairy stories about a ruler who made a few mistakes but usually got the basic direction of state policy right.

This is evident to anyone who visits Moscow. Down from Red Square by the side of the Manège there is a building which used to be the Lenin Museum. In the early 1990s it became a favourite gathering place for assorted kinds of Stalinist. Passers-by could listen to elderly Russians denouncing everything that had happened in the country since 1953. Individuals sold newspapers rejecting the entire course of history from Khrushchëv to Yeltsin. (Mingling with the Stalinists were still odder individuals advertising herbal cures for AIDS.) Their ideas were a jumble. The Stalinists hate Jews, freemasons and Americans. They support Russian nationalism while advocating the restoration of a multinational state. They hymn social sacrifice. They are a pathetic bunch, steeped in nostalgia, and the police refrain from arresting them even though their wild statements contravene the Russian 1993 Constitution.

The authorities have acted as if they assume that the reverence for Stalin will fade as the older generation dies off. Yet what will count in popular opinion is the degree of success attained by the Russian government in improving the living conditions of most citizens. Such amelioration seems far off. Wages are low and the conspicuous consumption of the wealthy minority known as the ‘new Russians’ earns deep resentment. Moscow flourishes while most cities and nearly all villages languish. About a third of society subsists below the UN-recognised poverty level. The political and economic elites have no strategy to effect a rapid transformation whereas parties of the far right and far left argue that simple solutions do indeed exist. Both Vladimir Zhirinovski’s Liberal-Democratic Party and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation under Gennadi Zyuganov have invoked the name of Stalin as a figure who did the country proud in his day. They contend that but for him the USSR would not have become an industrial and military power capable of defeating Hitler’s Germany. Neither party has won a majority at elections to the Presidency or the State Duma; and although nostalgia for Stalin persists, most Russians abhor the prospect of a return to violent politics. Until Russian society becomes materially more comfortable, however, the menacing icon of Joseph Stalin will be waved in banners raised by extremist politicians.

He continues to stir up controversy in Russia. Stalin bequeathed a consolidated system of rule to his successors. Personally he had remained devoted to Lenin and his rule had conserved and reinforced the Leninist regime. The one-party state established by the Bolsheviks within months of the October Revolution stayed firmly in place. The exclusion of alternative ideologies from public life was strengthened. The instruments of dictatorship, terror and a politicised judiciary were oiled and sharpened, and society and economy continued to be treated as a resource to be mobilised at the Kremlin’s command. The state’s economic control, substantial since the Civil War, was dramatically tightened. The party was said to know best about past, present and future. History was said to march in step to the drumbeat tapped out by Lenin and Stalin.

The continuities between the despotism of Stalin and the earlier Soviet period were cardinal features of the country’s history — and historians who wrote fondly about an essential contrast between Lenin the Humanitarian Idealist and Stalin the Ogre had turned their eyes from the historical record. Stalin was Lenin’s keen pupil. But there were also contrasts between them. Stalin made choices of his own, and some were almost certainly different from those which Lenin would have favoured if he had lived longer. A cautionary note must be attached to this verdict. Lenin was unpredictable in his policies even though his underlying assumptions changed little. Yet even Lenin was unlikely to have opted for the chaotic violence of the First Five-Year Plan and agricultural collectivisation. Not that Lenin would have been permanently patient with peasants, priests, nepmen and nationalists: he had his own moments of volatility. But he had a degree of self-restraint not shared by Stalin. Lenin did not overdo the persecution of internal party dissent. Such was his supremacy in the party that he did not need to remove troublemakers with exterminatory methods. Stalin’s terror campaigns of the 1930s were excessive even by the standards of Bolshevism, and Lenin would surely have given them neither encouragement nor approval.

Yet neither Lenin nor Stalin was a wholly free agent. They were constrained by the nature of the regime which they had created, and Stalin’s actions from the late 1920s were conditioned by the critical problems arising with the NEP. Lenin and Stalin led a party hostile to market economics, political pluralism and cultural, religious and social tolerance. They had established a one-party, one-ideology state beleaguered by capitalist powers; there was a limit to the kinds of policy they would accept.¹⁶ Without dictatorship the USSR as a communist order would have fallen apart. With freedom of expression or private entrepreneurship it would have been buffeted by opposition; and had it not built up its industrial and military might it would have risked conquest by a foreign predator. The institutions and practices available to deal with such difficulties were not infinitely malleable. Hierarchical state command would have to be the guiding principle. Administrative surveillance and punitive sanctions would be necessary to enforce compliance; and recurrent recourse to mobilising campaigns, moral invocation and purges — whether peaceful or not — would be unavoidable.¹⁷

Stalin could not act alone. While leading the NEP’s destruction, he had wide support in the central and local committees of the communist party. The enthusiasm for reinforcing state control was shared in sections of the party, political police, armed forces and Komsomol in the late 1920s. But a set of objectives is not the same as a plan. Stalin had no grand plan and his supporters lacked one too. Yet he operated with basic assumptions which they held in common with him. All the same he did not simply listen to the music of his times and adjust his behaviour to its rhythms. Stalin was not just a bureaucrat. He was a man driven by ambition and ideas. The general assumptions were fashioned by him into policies conforming to his intemperate nature and despotic inclinations.

As his authority increased, the need for support from his original close associates diminished. He could always replace them if they annoyed him. He imposed political, economic and cultural policies with increasing imperturbability. The Great Terror was instigated and supervised by him. The decision to sign a pact with Nazi Germany was his. Stalin’s, too, were the methods chosen to direct the Soviet war machine. His were the choices in external and internal policy after the war. Indeed the whole architecture of the Soviet state, once it had been consolidated at the end of the 1920s, was Stalin’s work based upon Lenin’s design. Even Stalin, though, needed to restrain himself. He had to act within the framework of the communist order. He objected to the patronage networks in politics and general administration. He knew he could not trust the information reaching him from below. He criticised the lack of conscientiousness among workers and peasants. He was annoyed by the weak impact of the regime’s Marxist–Leninist propaganda. But he had to operate with the human material and institutional resources available to him. The Great Terror strengthened and secured his despotism, but it also revealed to him the dangers of campaigning for total personal control. Although his methods remained intrusive, violent and ruthless, his purposes were more realistic after 1938.

That he succeeded to this large extent flowed from his skill in forming a central team of willing, if frightened, subordinates. He also managed to promote millions of young men and women to all levels of public activity who gave him their support in return for the power and comfort they received from him. Moreover, he ruled for so many years that those youths who had been through schooling in his time were affected by the propaganda; and the victory in the Second World War strengthened this tendency. Probably only a minority in society keenly admired him. Nevertheless many silent critics respected him for his policies of welfare and patriotism: Stalin did monstrous things and yet the popular attitude towards him was not wholly negative.

But what is his position in the history of his country and the world? Without Stalin and his rule, the USSR would have remained a brittle state with a fading grip on its society. Stalin modified Leninism and its practices and attitudes just as Lenin had subjected Marxism to his peculiar adaptation. This whole process — from Marx and Engels to Lenin and through to Stalin — involved a combination of reinforcement and emasculation. Lenin had invented a cul-de-sac for communism; Stalin drove the party down it. Under Stalin, no aspect of public and private life was exempt in theory or reality from central state interference. Communists pursued, in an extreme fashion, the objectives of comprehensive modernisation — and Stalin, like all communists, claimed that his party’s version of modernity outmatched all known others. He achieved a lot: urbanisation, military strength, education and Soviet pride. His USSR could claim impressive achievements. It became a model for radical political movements — and not only communist ones — elsewhere in the world. And at a time before the Second World War when liberal-democratic government signally failed to stand effectively up to fascism, Stalin appeared to have established a plausible alternative (at least until the Non-Aggression Treaty of September 1939). If this had not been the case, he would never have gained the support necessary for him to survive and flourish.

His standing in popular opinion was a complex matter. Countless people found it possible to give approval to several basic professed aims of the regime while withholding it from others. Victory in the war, moreover, turned Stalin into the embodiment of patriotism, world power and a radiant future for the country. And such was his despotic authority that innumerable people lived their lives on the assumption that they had to accept the political structures and the official ideology. Many millions of course hated him in the 1930s and continued to detest him to the end of his days. But supporters of one kind or another certainly existed widely among people in the USSR.

Nevertheless Stalin drove the Soviet order not only down the cul-de-sac but into the wall at its end. His system of command achieved immediate subjugation at the expense of a general consensus. The terror campaigns traumatised whole generations. Most people ignored official policies and intensified engagement in practices of clientelism, localism, fraud and obstructiveness. As he himself recognised, there were limits to his power. Leninism in any case was distinctly ‘unmodern’ in many ways and Stalin magnified this among its features. The USSR in the 1930s and 1940s was governed as if always there was a single correct set of policies. Stalin treated debate from below as a danger to desirable unanimity, and he arrested and killed to secure dominion. Potential as well as overt enemies perished. The result was a maelstrom of murder which left behind fear, distrust and self-withdrawal. The primacy of state interests led to political immobilisation as Stalin’s sprint to industrial and cultural transformation reached a dead end. His regime’s patterns of thought and action ultimately precluded the dynamic, open-ended developments characteristic of liberal-democratic, capitalist countries. He had saved and consolidated the Soviet order at the expense of making it durably competitive with its main rivals.

The Soviet Union was a totalitarian state, but this did not mean that it was characterised by perfect central control. Far from it. The more Stalin concentrated in his own hands power over specific areas of politics, the greater the lack of compliance he encountered in others. His USSR was a mixture of exceptional orderliness and exceptional disorderliness. So long as the chief official aims were to build up military and heavy-industrial strength the reality of the situation was disguised from him, his supporters and even his enemies. Stalin had only the dimmest awareness of the problems he had created.

Yet he was also much more complex than is widely supposed. As a politician he knew how to present himself selectively to diverse groups. Most of the world knew that he was determined, ruthless and murderous and that he chased the objective of turning the USSR into a global military and industrial power. It was no secret that he possessed skills as conspirator and bureaucrat. Paradoxically the effect of his official cult was often counter-productive. If Soviet propagandists said he was an exceptional person, critics drew the opposite conclusion and assumed he must have been a nonentity. But exceptional he surely was. He was a real leader. He was also motivated by the lust for power as well as by ideas. He was in his own way an intellectual, and his level of literary and editorial craft was impressive. About his psychological traits there will always be controversy. His policies were a mixture of calculated rationality and wild illogicality, and he reacted to individuals and to whole social categories with what was excessive suspiciousness by most standards. He had a paranoiac streak. But most of the time he did not seem insane to those close to him. The ideology, practices and institutions he inherited were ones which allowed him to give vent to his chronic viciousness.

Stalin was not a certifiable psychotic and never behaved in such a way as to be incapable of carrying out his public duties. As a family man, a guest and a friend he was crude. But his behaviour was seldom so bizarre until the late 1930s that others failed to find him companionable. He wrote poems as a young man and went on singing at dinner parties into his old age. He sent money to his boyhood friends in Georgia. There are those who want the ‘monsters’ in history to be represented as a species unto themselves. This is a delusion. Individuals like Stalin are thankfully few and far between in the recorded past — and without the October Revolution there would have been one fewer: Stalin’s emergence from exile and obscurity on to a worldwide stage of power, fame and impact would have been impossible if his party had not made the October Revolution and bolted together the institutional, procedural and doctrinal scaffolding which he was to exploit. Such individuals, when they have appeared, have usually displayed congenial ‘ordinary’ features even while carrying out acts of unspeakable abusiveness. History seldom gives unambiguous lessons, but this is one of them.