The Atlantic and Its Enemies

6. The World at the Death of Stalin

When the dictator’s death was announced, his subjects reacted first as if stunned, and then with mass hysteria. A great silence is reported to have fallen almost everywhere in the huge empire that he had dominated, from Rostock on the Baltic to Vladivostok, ten time zones away. Stalin had been in the tradition of despots who had ruled Eurasia, the most recent of whom had been Genghiz Khan and Tamerlane, threatening the Balkans, Persia, China, one sign of their capital a pyramid of skulls. Stalin had their type of absolute power since 1929, but with modern methods of communication, and the USSR had been convulsed. The old peasantry had been destroyed, 40 million of them crammed into towns and cities in a few years, many other millions starved to death or deported, and the rest living a scratch existence. A vast industrial machinery had been set in place, then there had been more millions of deaths in the course of political troubles, the ‘Purges’. Then had come the Second World War, another near 9 million deaths in the armed forces alone, and no-one knows how many further civilian millions. In 1945 had come the great victory over Nazi Germany, with Soviet troops conquering Berlin. Russians, for generations looked down on by Germans as backward and lazy, now saw tens of thousands of these same Germans marching through the streets of Moscow as prisoners, some of them losing control of their bowels in fear. Later on, seven elaborate skyscrapers went up in the capital, built by the captive German labourers, who were regarded as better bricklayers than ever the Russian natives would be. (In 1953, 3 million of these prisoners of war were still working, as forced labour; of the 90,000 men who had surrendered at Stalingrad, only 9,000 ever managed to return.) Then, in 1949, Communism made another enormous demonstration of its strength. The Soviet Union exploded its first bomb. In China, after a long civil war, Mao Tse-tung defeated the anti-Communist Nationalists, and came to Moscow to celebrate, to get his orders. So too at intervals did some Mátyás Rákosi or Klement Gottwald from Budapest or Prague, fresh from some intra-Party knifing, their capitals grimly Stalinized. In the whole empire, factory chimneys fumed, proclaiming forced industrialization; in southern Russia there had been cannibalism; in places there were still shadowy guerrilla wars. But Stalin had not just survived Hitler; he had turned Russia into a superpower, her capital the centre of a hemispheric empire.

It was Stalin’s seventieth birthday, 21 December. In the preceding months, there had been endless tributes in the newspapers. Stalin was certainly a well-read man, but he claimed to dominate whole ranges of scholarship — even, at the time of the battle of Stalingrad, contributing an article to a zoological journal about a particular rock-fish that his rival, Trotsky, had apparently discovered (in Turkish exile). Now, scholars, artists, intellectuals, writers praised and imitated him: you had to open any article, more or less regardless of subject, with quotations from Stalin and Lenin. On 21 December Stalin’s face was shown on an enormous balloon above the Kremlin, and there were parades throughout the country, with floats to glorify ‘the greatest genius of all times and nations’. That evening, in the Bolshoy Theatre, there was a grand gala. On stage was a huge portrait of Stalin, and in front sat the leaders of Communism: Mao Tse-tung, fresh from his triumph; leaders of the various countries that the USSR had taken in 1944-5 in central Europe, including a bearded and weaselly little German, Walter Ulbricht; a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, ‘passionate’ Dolores Ibárruri, who had been the chief mouthpiece of the defeated left-wing side (her granddaughter in time became Russian interpreter for the king of Spain); and a small troop of hard faces from western Europe. The British, with a tiny Communist Party, were hardly represented (though, in 1953, for the funeral, a rich Communist-sympathizing London barrister, John Platts-Mills, did manage to attend, in his private aircraft), but the French were slavish and the Italians flattered. In the auditorium sat thousands of delegates, carefully ranked, with the senior families in the front rows, and, as first to enter, the family of Lavrenti Beria, who ran the security empire, with the millions of slaving prisoners. It was he who had stamped the Soviet atom bomb out of the ground, partly with internment camps, sharashki, where nuclear physicists worked as convicts. Speeches were then made, for hours on end, and a rising star was Nikita Khrushchev, whom Stalin had promoted (he was seated on the left, Mao Tse-tung on the right). Khrushchev’s speech ended with: ‘Glory to our dear father, our wise teacher, to the brilliant leader of the Party of the Soviet people and of the workers of the entire world, Comrade Stalin!’

Stalin had sunk monstrously into the consciousness and subconsciousness of the world, or at any rate the part of the world that he dominated. For eight years, since the end of the Second World War, his picture had been everywhere, huge statues had gone up to him, and secret-police chiefs all through the empire were kept vigilant at the idea that he might make a telephone call to them in the middle of the night — for his own working hours were strange. In the end, they killed him.

In 1953 Stalin was seventy-three and age was showing. The suspiciousness grew, and when his physical health seemed to be weakening, suspicion caused him to have his own doctors arrested, imprisoned, tortured to make them confess that there was a medical plot afoot. Then came signs that he was planning another culling of chief subordinates — Beria especially. In the 1930s, he had killed off three quarters of the Central Committee, along with much of the senior military establishment and then, for good measure, the chief of security who had organized it all. Now, the senior men could read the telltale signs that the old man was meditating another great purge. On the face of things, he could still be affable and welcoming, and on the night of 28 February/1 March he did stage one of his dinner parties, at which he liked people to get drunk (on one occasion a British ambassador had to be carried out). He told the servants not to wake him: he was usually around by midday in any event. But on 1 March, no. The bewildered staff did not know what to do, and, again because of the suspiciousness, there was no chief domestic secretary to take any responsibility; he had been carted off months before. The servants, with the 1,500 security guards posted all around, waited. A light finally did go on, at about six o’clock, in the quarters he had chosen for the night (out of suspicion, he changed his bedroom regularly, to foil would-be assassins). Then nothing more. Finally, since a document had arrived for him to read, a maid was sent into Stalin’s room. She found him on the floor, obviously victim of a stroke. He could hardly move or speak: only the terrible, malignant eyes had life in them.

Still no-one was prepared to take responsibility: the servants, the ministers they telephoned; only Beria could react. He told them to remain silent about the stroke, and arrived that night. The system being so strange, Stalin had remained for ten hours or so without medical attention, and now they had to go and ask his chief doctor in the special prison what he would advise. Beria himself at first told the guards to go, that Stalin was ‘sleeping’, and by the time doctors arrived, Stalin had been unattended for twelve hours. Did Beria do this deliberately? Stalin’s drunken son burst in, on 3 March, shrieked that they had killed him, and according to Molotov, Beria said as much: ‘I did away with him, I saved you all.’ As the old man slid into and out of coma, Beria did not bother to hide his hatred; by 3 March the doctors pronounced that there was no hope, and death came two days later, with a final scene that his daughter remembered:

He literally choked to death as we watched. At what seemed like the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry and full of the fear of death… He suddenly lifted his hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on us all

• the old housekeeper in hysterics, on her knees the while, as members of the Party executive came and went, and Beria, at the end, hardly able to control his glee.

Between themselves, before Stalin died, they managed to cobble together an agreement to take over the government, without any immediate fuss, and Beria emerged as the main man, with the Ministry of the Interior, to which would be attached the Ministry of State Security. Division of these two had been one of the signs that Stalin intended to strip Beria of his full powers, whittle him down and then eliminate him. In the same way, the new men reversed an arrangement that Stalin had made, to expand the size of the Party’s leading body, the ‘Praesidium’ (the old Politburo), to twenty-five as against an original ten. The ten older members would have been swamped by the new ones — an obvious way in which the old man could prepare to get rid of them. With at least some agreement, the new leaders were prepared to let the people know, at last, of Stalin’s death. The body was embalmed and laid out, and crowds upon crowds came to see it. Pandemonium followed, and hundreds of people were crushed to death in the middle of Moscow.

What were the new leaders to do? They were themselves Stalinists, involved in all of his doings, with hardly a scruple to be detected. The one with the worst record was obviously enough Beria, and the others had every reason to fear the power that he could use against them: one of the first things that he had done, when Stalin began to die, was to go and remove top-secret documents from the dictator’s desk. What did they contain? Already, said Khrushchev in his memoirs, his colleagues were wary, with little signs to each other of apprehension as to what Beria might do. They apportioned the various offices among themselves, and Khrushchev got what seemed to be the least of them — he was one among eight other secretaries of the Central Committee — while Georgy Malenkov took Stalin’s seat as head of the Council of Ministers. In the system, and the problem grew more complicated without a dictator, offices sometimes lacked the power that their names should have meant. Did the Party govern, and what was the role of the State in that event? And which part of the Party really had the power — the police or security element, later known as the KGB? These questions came up as soon as Stalin had died, and a struggle for power duly commenced.

However, to start with, there was a somewhat strange business. The Stalin tyranny began to be whittled down, and elements of liberalization came in. People started to come back from the huge prison camp network. Some, when arrested, had had the kind of acute intelligence that Communism fostered — a matter of survival, to guess what to do — and had confessed to crimes that were manifestly ridiculous. Thus, the director of the Leningrad Zoo had confessed that he had staged ballet rehearsals outside the cages so as to drive the monkeys mad. Any commission looking into ‘crimes’ would of course at once spot a preposterous one, and release the man. But there were other pieces of relaxation that touched on the two central themes of Soviet history from then onwards. These had to do with the non-Russian peoples on the one side, and relations with Germany on the other. Both themes now came up, and it was a measure of the strangeness of the system that the liberalizer, in both, was Beria, the man of Terror whom his colleages feared. However, given that this was a system in which information was very carefully doled out or distorted, the secret police were the agency best able to know what was going on, through a huge network of spies, and experts on various foreign countries. Beria knew well enough that the country was poor, sometimes famished, living in often disgusting conditions. Oppression at home and abroad cost an enormous amount, distorting production. Liberalization would solve some of this. Half of the USSR’s population consisted of non-Russians, and these had generally been run, tyrannically, through Russian Communists. In the Ukraine, where there had still been nationalist partisans fighting in the forests until very recently, Russians, not Ukrainians, had been trusted and in the Caucasus, the Baltic, Central Asia, it had been much the same. Whole peoples had been transported, in any event — the Chechens, for instance, to far-off Kazakhstan, along with the Tatars of the Crimea, who lost half of their population in the process (the Chechens, once they arrived, decided to reintroduce polygamy, so that their population could be restored). Now, Beria allowed some non-Russian Communists to take over, locally. Even in 1953 it caused head-shaking in Moscow. Stalin had survived Hitler’s attack largely because he put himself at the head of a Russian national movement, as distinct from a Communist one. What would happen if loyal Russians were now displaced by slippery Georgians and, worse still, Central Asians, who would use their power to instal their brothers and their cousins and their uncles through some hidden tribal or even sectarian network? Playing off the nationalities against Moscow was dangerous; in the end it brought down the USSR. There were pre-echoes of that in Beria’s post-Stalin months.

But he also had a sense of strategy in foreign affairs. Stalin may have been absolute master at home, but he had the modern countries all against him, and a war was going on, pointlessly, in the middle of Korea. In 1945, when Hitler’s Germany had been smashed, the USSR had been in alliance with the West, and various arrangements for the post-war period had been drawn up. From Beria’s viewpoint, these had gone very badly wrong: the West had been misplayed. NATO now existed and it united western Europe, despite the existence in France and Italy of strong Communist parties; West Berlin was a leech attached to a main artery of the Soviet system; West German industry was recovering fast and would clearly be used for the rearmament of the country. The same was coming to pass in Japan. What had the USSR got in return for this? Peasant countries on her borders, each quite complicated. It had also gained East Germany, now dressed up as the ‘German Democratic Republic’, but everyone knew that it was a fake state. The chief element was that American troops were stationed in western Europe, that nuclear weaponry was in the air, that western Europe was overcoming the post-war crises, and American officials were all around, to encourage freer trade, both within Europe and with the USA. From Moscow’s viewpoint this was all very alarming, maybe presaging a general attack, and in his last years Stalin himself expected a war. Beria knew different: no-one knowing, through the extraordinarily highly placed Soviet spies, what was really being calculated in the West could have any serious idea that it would go to war. If NATO existed, if the Americans maintained a military presence in Europe, this was purely in response to Soviet provocations — a long list of cruelty and unnecessary aggression, including even the continued use of old Nazi concentration camps. There were still some idealists who chose to go and live in the ‘German Democratic Republic’, or ‘the other Germany’ — Bertolt Brecht the main one, though there were other men and women who had detested California. Disillusionment followed.

At this stage, German reunification was still a matter for diplomatic competition. The West argued for free elections, and meanwhile got the United Nations, which the West at the time controlled, to set up a commission to study the subject (it was refused entry to East Germany). At the time, there was also question of a German contribution to defence — the European Defence Community being the chief vehicle for this, and part of the post-Marshall arrangements that were the basis of the later European unification. This of course worried Moscow — she had always feared an alliance against her of the entire West, Germany included. Now, some of those same German generals who had reached Leningrad, Moscow, the lower Volga and the Caucasus were apparently being groomed again for an attack. Stalin himself had responded with a note, of 10 March 1952, which became famous, and over the interpretation of which some foolish historical statements have been made. He proposed the formation of a German government, to include the East; it would be recognized for the purposes of a peace treaty; Germany would be neutral, i.e. would not join any Western organization at all, including the economic ones; and might have her own army; and would be able to return civil and political rights. East German Communists proudly assured the Left-leaning Italian socialist Pietro Nenni that they would soon be in much the same position as the Italian Communist Party, i.e. waiting in the wings for power. Stalin also still had millions of prisoners in his thrall, whose return would be a considerable gift. The aim, overall, was at German national sentiment — there was even mention of giving political rights back to SS men — at the very moment when treaties signed in Bonn and Paris for a European army were supposed to be ratified, and the timing was not coincidental. The three Western powers consulted, and they then put the question as to free elections; they also said that a future German government should be free to choose alliances. The exchanges went on until September, always failing on these two points, since the USSR would never accept a united Germany, allied with the West, and despite some effort with the small print, never accepted that the elections would be really free. Anti-Cold War historians held the Stalin note up as evidence that the man was sincere about German neutrality and unification, ‘Finlandization’ as it came to be called, but subsequent evidence shows that he gave the matter much thought — the note went through fourteen versions, three of them annotated by him — and seems to have been possessed by the notion that he could deliver a Communist Germany, just as Czechoslovakia had produced a strong Party. The Party of Socialist Unity (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland, or SED) in East Germany was groomed for control of the entire country, and was told to accelerate ‘the construction of socialism’ in April 1950. The next Party congress, in July, went ahead with collectivization of agriculture, heavy-industrial plans and the extinction of small-scale trade and workshops. If Stalin did not get the Germany he wanted, he would in other words at least get his bit of Germany to fall into line.

In any event, the West Germans quite clearly preferred their freedom to their national unification. Adenauer, the Christian Democratic leader, was certain that there could be no honest arrangement with the USSR and was determined to go ahead with the Western programme, even if that meant accepting a divided Germany. He worried that the West might let him down, with some Allied conference that would leave Germany at Moscow’s mercy — some European security arrangement of the sort had even been suggested by an American Secretary of State (James F. Byrnes) in 1946. He also had an argument, that a prosperous and democratic West Germany would in the end act as a magnet for the East as a whole: and so indeed it did, though Adenauer (and the Frenchman, Schuman) were reckoning on up to ten years, and not nearly forty. The West Germans went ahead with rearmament plans and even conscription, although many of the Social Democrats detested the idea, as for that matter did some of the Christian Democrats. The French, too, had swallowed their doubts, despite threats of ‘Guns for Huns’. The Soviet side had offered (and Molotov stressed the offer again in 1954) some European security system that would include the USSR but exclude the USA and of course NATO Germany. This idea, to be launched with the sort of large international conference that the USSR could quite easily manipulate (the other countries being divided among themselves, with a number of small ones to cause trouble), was now in the air. It was ‘Europe for the Europeans’, and it later grew nuclear-free extrapolations; in time it became ‘our common European home’ — a famous enough expression, later on, under Gorbachev, but promoted before him by much harder men. The idea was not unpopular in some circles in Germany and elsewhere, and even had attractions on the Right. But there was one unshakably strong argument against it: Stalin and all his works, particularly the repulsive little state in East Germany. Its capital, East Berlin, had been rebuilt in homage to Moscow. The centre, the Alexander-Platz, was a gigantic field of concrete, and off it marched the Stalin-Allee, another hideous boulevard of concrete, with a peculiar smell, partly made-up of local low-quality coal and partly of the Soviet method of oil refinery. Along it went lorries, packed with rubble, and occasional large, curtained, black cars, carrying the unlovely Communist bosses. There was another peculiarity to East Berlin. Bomb damage did not mean that old buildings were torn down, as in the West. Instead, they were patched together, at least in areas such as the Schönhauser Allee or the Vinetastrasse, outside of the international gaze, ripe for ‘gentrification’ two generations down the line, but at the time almost uninhabitable. No German in his senses would want to live there.

The tensions of 1952 were such that Stalin was obviously thinking of a war, and he told Mao to prepare for one. Then came, perhaps in preparation for it, a new ‘purge’, both at home and in the satellite states, to dispose of potential traitors before they had time to act. He did not trust Jews at all, and they were, in the main, eliminated from leading positions in the satellite states, and from influential ones in Moscow, though the Budapest ones had an adhesive quality, and he sacrificed some gentiles instead. Paranoia of an extreme kind reigned, but Stalin was untouchable, had knees knocking, and his nominees, while secretly hating the system, could only wait for his death.

Such was the position on 5 March 1953. Beria, with understanding from Georgy Malenkov, now moved into the vacuum, took charge of things, and had a strategy of his own. In the first place, Stalin’s crude challenges to the West had left no room for the divisions within it. We now know, for instance, that the Americans were not really using West Germany as a tool against the USSR: up to 1950, they regarded Bonn as a provisional solution, and one that had been forced upon them; they still used the machinery set up at Potsdam. But then had come the Korean War, and in 1952 Eisenhower was elected President on a strongly anti-Soviet platform: he seemed even to be saying that the USA should make use of its then enormous superiority in nuclear weapons. The Germans themselves were divided, and the one argument that Adenauer could always use was that East Germany was a tyrannically run place — no advertisement for life under ‘socialism’. The new leaders were clearly anxious to soften the line, and various things followed from this — on 27 March a limited amnesty (10,000 people, including Molotov’s Jewish wife); on 4 April, release of the imprisoned doctors of the ‘plot’; on 10 June, dropping of Soviet claims against Turkey; in June, resumption of relations with Yugoslavia and even Israel; in the same period, the Chinese at last made the vital concession in Korea, with an armistice declared in July. In fact, on 19 March the new leaders, including the true Stalinist Molotov, agreed that the Korean War must be stopped, and the Chinese foreign minister, Chou En-lai, got his orders to that effect on 21 March, in Moscow.

To all of this there was a nuclear background: the USSR was weak in that respect, and needed respite from Stalin’s warring, his turning every neighbour into an enemy. The essential question remained Germany, and here there were divisions, with Molotov following the Party line, to the effect that a Communist East Germany was a necessity. Beria had other ideas, and probably regarded the Party with contempt. Why not try a new tactic altogether: prepare to get rid of East Germany, Walter Ulbricht and all, in exchange for a Germany that would collaborate economically and politically? Such was the model of Rapallo, the Italian town where, in 1922, the USSR and Republican Germany, bizarrely represented by elderly homosexuals in pyjamas, had entered upon semi-alliance. Then, the two countries, isolated, made an agreement that even included considerable German help for Soviet industry and for that matter Soviet help for the German military. A normal and parliamentary Germany, detached from the West? A sort of Finland? And if it meant getting rid of little Ulbricht, why not?

Of course, in the then Soviet system, such things were not written down, and when eventually ‘revelations’ from the archives emerged, they did not really reveal anything more than would have been known to readers of the Reader’s Digest at its purest. Even Walter Pieck, a lieutenant of Ulbricht’s, kept a diary in a code of a code of a summary. Stray lines in memoirs alone ensured that something of the truth emerged. Once Beria started to suggest sacrificing East Germany for a new Rapallo, a strange episode followed. East Germany had been whipped into following the Soviet course, and half a million of her people left, through Berlin. Walter Ulbricht was asking for Soviet economic assistance and was told to move more slowly with ‘the construction of socialism’. The Praesidium discussed this on 27 May and sent a Note to the East Germans. Such documents had a character all their own. There would be a thick framework of ‘wooden language’, unreadable if you were not initiated. Men who sat through six-hour speeches of industrial statistics at enormous Party gatherings, applauding at the right moments, with stewards lining the wall, holding stopwatches, and indicating ‘stop’ when the designated speaker’s designated applause had been completed, were indeed initiated. If they just listened, they would find that at some point there would be a passage meaning something. This was a way of demonstrating the leaders’ power (similarly, if one of them gave an interview, the technique was to answer a question at enormous length, boring the interviewer into the ground).

On 2 June the Soviet Note said the East German leadership should, ‘to make the present political situation more healthy and to consolidate our position in Germany and the international arena, act over the German question such as to create a united, democratic, peaceful and independent Germany’. This was referred to as a ‘new course’ and there was to be some liberalization in East Germany; some of the ‘construction of socialism’ measures were to be cancelled, and the Soviet Control Commission would be replaced by a civilian, Vladimir Semyonov, political adviser to the Control Commission, a member of the NKVD and close to Beria. He was to replace Ulbricht with more pliable figures — Rudolf Herrnstadt, editor of the Party newspaper, and Wilhelm Zaisser, head of East German security, also close to Beria. After all, even East German Communists were sometimes uncomfortable with being hated and lied to. At the same time reparations were ended, and the Soviet firms set up to exploit East Germany were disbanded. Beria was in effect giving some sense to the Stalin Note of March 1952 — not intending full-scale Communization of Germany but, instead, looking for co-operation or ‘Finlandization’. From 2 to 4 June there was a conference at Berlin, ‘the new course’ being explained to Ulbricht. He went ahead with some concessions as far as small trade and farmers were concerned, and he released a few hundred political prisoners, but he did nothing to lessen the load on the industrial workers. His goal was a Communist Germany. That had been the whole purpose of his life, and he probably had some sort of encouragement from within Moscow. Ulbricht knew how the system worked. He resisted the pressure, and instead launched a ‘provocation’ (meaning, in Continental and Communist parlance, an action designed to produce its opposite). He decreed at once, in mid-May, that each worker must produce 10 per cent more, while rations went down — equivalent to a drop in wages and an increase in hours worked. The provocation duly provoked trouble. On 16 June there were demonstrations in the very centre of ‘the construction of socialism’, by builders working on the grotesque Stalin-Allee. Did Beria’s enemies stage a provocation, to discredit ‘the new course’ and Beria, in collusion with Ulbricht and Pieck, who had been trotting in and out of Soviet offices? Or were the demonstrations just what they purported to be, a rising against exploitation? On 17 June the unrest spread, with workers in the big factories in other centres of industry joining in. That day, the Soviet authorities declared martial law and sent in tanks; some 200 people were killed. The whole episode gave the West, and West Germany in particular, excellent propaganda.

It also discredited Beria. A conspiracy now grew against him, and it was inspired by Nikita Khrushchev. He had the very useful talent, in that system, of threatening no-one. He had risen through the Party, some of the time as manager of Moscow (where he tore down many old buildings). He was fat and piggy-eyedly jovial, and had a rustic air: his colleagues wrote him off as second-rate. When they agreed on the post-Stalin arrangements, their idea was to return to the days when the secretary of the Central Committee was just a technician, drowning in files. But Stalin himself had used that administrative post to great effect, because the other men in the Politburo ignored him while they fought among themselves; he controlled appointments to this or that Party function, and knew who was who. Khrushchev also knew how to do this, promoting men who would later be very useful allies. Meanwhile, given the fear of Beria that existed among the others, there was some response to Khrushchev’s prompting when he told them that Beria must be overthrown. The Berlin affair gave him a very good excuse. He had another useful ally. The war hero Marshall Georgy Zhukov had been sidelined by Stalin, and the successors brought him back as deputy defence minister: that meant troops on their side. The plotters were careful never to talk openly, there being informants or ‘bugs’ all around; they behaved towards Beria as if all were normal, even chaffing him about his spies, and in Khrushchev’s case accepting lifts in his car.

On 26 June a meeting of the Praesidium of the Council of Ministers had been called by Malenkov, who had been left in the chair. He was programmed to say at some stage that Party matters should be discussed, and that Beria’s office needed to be rationalized. Beria’s men were sitting outside the room as usual, and they had to be neutralized: that was done by Zhukov’s men, who had had weapons smuggled in. Beria arrived (as usual) self-important and late, with a briefcase. Malenkov opened up, questioning Beria’s role, and when Beria opened the briefcase, intending to take out papers, the conspirators feared that he would produce a gun and called in Zhukov’s men. They arrested him and, when dusk fell, smuggled him out of the Kremlin, wrapped in a carpet. He went off to a military prison, where he was soon joined by his closest collaborators, the torturer Viktor Abakumov especially. Written pleas, hysterical in tone, went out from the cells to Malenkov, but after a secret trial Beria was executed the following December. His crimes were publicly denounced by his ex-colleagues. Indirectly, he was taking the blame for what Stalin had done, and they were distancing themselves as best they could from the tyrant: Communism was to have a human face.

Khrushchev, the least regarded of these colleagues, did indeed have a human face, though pachydermic, and he was now asserting himself. In appearance, Malenkov had the chief role, but he had been Beria’s associate, and the next stage was for him to be eliminated. Yet again, Khrushchev was underestimated: he now became, in September, first secretary of the Central Committee, and thereby controlled agendas and appointments, and so low did the others rate him that his nomination came only after several other apparently more pressing items on the Central Committee’s list of topics for the day. Meanwhile, Malenkov had his own ideas as to liberalization. Prices were cut, and peasant taxes also; he even proposed allowing peasants to have small plots of their own, whereas in Stalin’s time all of the land was supposedly collective in case peasants were tempted to work privately, for themselves. Other ideas came up. For instance, there had long been a tension between Party and State, in the sense that the machinery of the State did not have any independence, operating as the Party wanted, and through Party nominees (the nomenklatura of people ‘cleared’ by the Party). This had economic consequences, in that industry might be shaped by some powerful boss, to build up his own empire, regardless of economic sense, and there was similar trouble with appointments, as square pegs were put into round holes. Late in 1953 Malenkov told the Party that some government agencies must be removed from its control, and made himself very unpopular. Besides, Khrushchev set himself up as the agricultural specialist, and made little effort to conceal the truth — that Russians were eating less well than they had done before the Revolution itself. In 1954 Malenkov was gradually effaced, Party defeating government; early in 1955 he was formally demoted by the others. Khrushchev had won.

Nikita Khrushchev was of just the generation to think that Communism would triumph, worldwide. He was born of peasant stock in a small town of the Ukraine, Yuzovka (now Donetsk), his family straight from the land, mostly illiterate. Yuzovka took its very name from foreign capital, in that the man who developed its mines was a Welshman called Hughes, and the young Khrushchev went down the mines. But the family did not drink, his parents pushed him, he acquired an education because his mother enlisted the help of a priest (Khrushchev, like so many Bolsheviks, was a good mathematician), and when the Revolution came, he joined in and worked his way up. This was all quite standard for the USSR in the twenties and thirties: the peasant Khrushchevs displaced the Jewish intellectual Trotskys who had originally led the Revolution (a quarter of Party deaths in the early twenties were suicides). Stalin controlled whole waves of men like Khrushchev, and was very cunning in setting them against each other. He also made sure that they had to take their share of responsibility in his rule of murder and mass imprisonment, and Khrushchev’s own career shows that he joined in without demur. But he was himself quite cunning, and learned that, if you wanted to advance in Soviet politics, you needed not to be a threat to anyone, even not to be taken seriously at all. His role at the top level was to play the buffoon who nevertheless somehow got things done. In manner, Khrushchev was that Russian figure, the clown, but, as Arthur Koestler said, a clown can look very sinister, seen close to.

Khrushchev was not the type of man to have doubts about the eventual victory of Communism. It had catapulted him from Yuzovka to the Kremlin, of course, but it had also catapulted Russia. In the days of Yuzovka, she had counted as backward, filled with illiterate peasants, and she had lost a war against Germany. After the Revolution, she had become a great industrial country and defeated Germany. There was much wrong with this very simple picture, but that would not have crossed Khrushchev’s mind: Communism had started off with a meeting, of about forty people, in 1903, and now look where it was — dominating more of the world than the British Empire had done. Khrushchev himself, the former peasant and apprentice miner, now had an educated family, with a grand apartment overlooking the Moskva river, and grand offices in the Kremlin. He could snap his fingers, and the President of the USA would jump. Not bad for a boy from Yuzovka: the Revolution would win.