The Penguin History of Modern Russia

15 The Hammers of Peace (1945–1953)

The compound of the Soviet order had been put under an excruciating test from abroad and had survived. Not only was Stalin still in power but also the one-party, one-ideology state was intact. There also remained a state-owned economy orientated towards the production of industrial capital goods and armaments. The mechanisms of the police state were in place; and, as before, it was not even a police state where due process of law was respected.

Yet there were features of the Soviet compound that had proved their ineffectiveness during the war even from a pragmatic viewpoint. Political, economic, national, social and cultural difficulties were acute. In the subsequent twenty-five years the political leaders tried various answers. Stalin simply reimposed the pre-war version of the compound and crushed any hopes of incipient change. His successors under Khrushchëv tried to remove certain elements in a campaign of reforms. But Khrushchëv introduced deep instabilities and fellow leaders came to regard his policies and techniques as a threat to the regime’s long-term durability. After sacking him, they attempted to conserve the compound by policies which trimmed the commitment to reform. All these changes, furthermore, were made while Soviet leaders wrestled with problems of geo-politics, technological modernization, popular indoctrination and their own power and its legitimization as a group and as individuals. Their constant quest was to conserve the compound in a manner that suited their interests.

For the world in 1945 had changed beyond retrieval since 1939. Adolf Hitler had shot himself in his Berlin bunker. Benito Mussolini had been hanged by Italian partisans and Hideki Tojo was awaiting trial before American judges. German, Italian and Japanese racist militarism had been shattered. The USA, the USSR and the United Kingdom had emerged as the Big Three in global power.

It was they who established the United Nations in October 1945. Without the Big Three, no major international project could be brought to completion. Britain had incurred huge financial debts to the Americans in the Second World War and already was a junior partner in her relationship with them. The crucial rivalry was therefore between the Big Two, the USA and the USSR, a rivalry which at times threatened to turn into all-out military conflict. Fortunately the Third World War did not break out; and the American-Soviet rivalry, while constituting a constant danger to global peace, became known as the Cold War. Global capitalism confronted global communism. President Harry S Truman, Roosevelt’s successor, was determined to assert the superiority of free markets and electoral politics over the Soviet system; but the likelihood of capitalism’s eventual victory in this struggle was far from being self-evident.

Multitudes of people in the USSR and Eastern Europe detested communist government, and there was no paucity of commentary in the West about Stalin. The horrors of his rule were vividly described by journalists and diplomats. Quickly the admiration of the USSR for its decisive contribution to the defeat of Hitler gave way to revulsion from the policies and practices of the Soviet regime after 1945.

Yet the Soviet Union of ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin continued to attract a degree of approval. It still seemed to many observers that the USSR served as a model for enabling the emergence of industrial, literate societies out of centuries of backwardness. Central state planning had acquired global respect during the war. But whereas most countries with capitalist economies tended to restrict such planning after 1945, the USSR persisted with it on the grounds that it obviated the social evils characteristic of the West. Unemployment did not exist in the USSR. Among the large capitalist economies after the defeat of Germany and Japan, only a few such as Britain and Sweden sponsored a comprehensive system of state welfare-assistance. Furthermore, the new communist authorities in Eastern Europe commenced a campaign of universal education and took steps so that the local nationalisms which had helped to cause the First and Second World Wars might be prevented from exploding again into violence.

The world communist movement followed the USSR’s example: even the Chinese communist party, which took power in Beijing in September 1949, acknowledged the USSR’s hegemony. The large communist parties in Italy and France had fought their own partisan struggles against Fascism and Nazism; but they, too, obeyed Moscow’s line of the day; their relationship with the All-Union Communist Party was more filial than fraternal. The Soviet Union was a military power of the first rank. In the post-war years, through to the break-up of the USSR, pride in the Soviet armed forces’ victory over Hitler and in their ability to compete with the USA’s nuclear power pervaded the regime. The resonance of her ideology reached parts of the globe where it had been unknown. Soviet political institutions had never been stronger, and the confidence of the country’s leaders never greater.

If Stalin and his confederates were to maintain their image around the world, however, they had to curtail the world’s knowledge about their country. The consequences of war were dreadful. Stalin sent NKVD investigators into all the areas that had ever been under German occupation to draw up an account of Soviet losses, and their reports made for depressing reading. Roughly twenty-six million citizens of the USSR lay dead as the direct result of the Second World War.¹ The western regions of the USSR suffered disproportionate damage: perhaps as much as a quarter of the population of Ukraine and Belorussia failed to survive the war. The losses in Russia itself were also enormous. The number of Russians killed in wartime is not yet known; but indisputably it was huge. The Germans had occupied large regions of central, northern and southern Russia for lengthy periods and 1.8 million civilians were killed by them on the territory of the RSFSR.² This was half the number of such deaths in Ukraine; but it should not be forgotten that Russians constituted one tenth of Ukraine’s population in 1939.³ In any case the RSFSR, where four fifths of citizens were Russians, had supplied most of the conscripts to a Red Army which suffered grievous losses throughout the Soviet-German war.

The dead were not the only victims. Russia and the rest of the USSR teemed with widows, orphans and invalids. Innumerable families had been destroyed or disrupted beyond repair. The state could not cope with the physical rehabilitation of those veterans left disabled at the end of military hostilities. Nor could it secure adequate food and shelter for the waifs and strays on Soviet streets. And since many more men than women had been killed, there would inevitably be a demographic imbalance between the sexes. The USSR’s people appeared more like the losers than the victors of the Second World War.

The urban landscape throughout the western Soviet Union was a ruin. Minsk, Kiev and Vilnius had become acres of rubble. In the RSFSR, Stalingrad was a blackened desert. The Red Army had implemented a scorched-earth policy in its rapid retreat in 1941. But the damage done by the Wehrmacht on its own long retreat in 1944–5 was vastly more systematic. Hardly a factory, collective farm, mine or residential area was left intact; 1710 towns were obliterated along with about 70,000 villages. Whole rural districts were wrecked so thoroughly that agriculture practically ceased in them.⁴ In Cherkessk in Stavropol region, for instance, the Soviet investigative commission reported the demolition of thirty main buildings, including the party and soviet headquarters, the furniture factory, the radio station, the saw-mill and the electricity-generating plant. Hospitals and clinics had been put out of action. The town’s thirty-five libraries had been blown up along with their 235,000 books. The commission added in a matter-of-fact fashion: ‘All the good new schools were turned into stables, garages, etc.’⁵

It had been Nazi policy to reduce the Russians and other Soviet nations to starvation, poverty and cultural dissolution. And so, as the Wehrmacht and Gestapo moved out of north-western Russia, they paused at Petrodvorets in order to annihilate the palace built for the Empress Elizabeth to the design of the Italian architect Rastrelli. No one who has visited that now-reconstructed great palace is likely to forget the records of vandalism: pictures defaced, wall-coverings burnt, statues bludgeoned to smithereens.

Displaced civilians and disattached soldiers swarmed on to the highways and rail-routes leading to Moscow. The Smolensk Road, from Warsaw to Moscow, was crammed with Soviet troops making their way back home and often carrying war booty. Lorries, cars, horses and even railway carriages were commandeered by them. The chaos of administration increased at the end of military hostilities, and total detailed dominance by the Kremlin was unobtainable. The police state was at its most efficient in Moscow; but the Soviet security police was overstretched by its recently-acquired responsibility for conducting surveillance over the countries of Eastern Europe. An attempt had been made in 1943 to rationalize the NKVD’s functions between two agencies: the NKVD itself and a new NKGB (People’s Commissariat of State Security). But the workload was enormous, and the result was that in many towns and most villages of the USSR there was a temporary relief from the state’s interference on a day-to-day basis.

A depiction of the scene comes to us from the Italian writer Primo Levi. Having escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp, Levi had to make his own arrangements to get back to his native Turin. He wandered into Warsaw, where thieving and black-marketeering were rife. He walked on from Warsaw into Belorussia, and yet again he found that illegal private bartering was the only way to stay alive. After much haggling, he exchanged a few trinkets with peasants for one of their chickens. Of the party-state’s presence there was little sign.⁶

For Stalin, therefore, military victory in 1945 presented many risks.⁷ The material and social damage would take years to mend, and disorder might occur in Russia or any other Soviet republic or indeed any country of Eastern Europe. Stalin’s discomfort was sharpened by the reports that broad segments of society yearned for him to abandon the policies and methods of the past. The Red Army soldiers who had marched into Europe had seen things that made them question the domestic policies of their own government. Greeting fellow soldiers of the Western Allies on the river Elbe or in Berlin, they had been able to learn a little about foreign ways. Those other citizens, too, who had never crossed the boundaries of the USSR had had experiences which increased their antagonism to the Soviet regime. Partisans and others had resisted Hitler without needing to be compelled by the Kremlin; and Stalin’s near-catastrophic blunders in 1941–2 had not been forgotten.

Then there were those who had objections of an even more immediate nature: the kulaks, priests and national leaders repressed during the 1930s; the Gulag inmates; the deported nationalities of the Second World War; the peoples of the annexed Baltic states, western Ukraine and Moldavia; the Red Army soldiers captured as prisoners-of-war by the Germans. Countless millions of Soviet citizens would have been delighted by the collapse of Stalin’s party and government.

The sentiment was popular, too, that the wartime rigours applied by the Soviet political leadership for the defeat of Hitler should be removed. Otherwise the war would not have been worth fighting. This sense was strong among men and women who had become adults in 1941–5; for they, unlike their parents, had no direct experience of the purges of 1937–8. They felt fear, but it was not always the petrifying fear common to their parents.⁸ There was also less tension than in earlier times between the working-class and the intelligentsia. In particular, the soldiers on campaign had shared appalling conditions regardless of social origin, and they wanted policies to be changed not just for a section of society but for everyone. Courageous individual spirits had been produced by the war. It is no accident that some of the most durable critics of the ascendant party leadership in the 1960s and 1970s, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Roy Medvedev, had been young veterans in the war.⁹

At the USSR Supreme Soviet elections in 1946, people privately complained that there was no point in voting since there was only a single candidate for each seat and the electoral results would not affect decisions of policy. In the countryside rumours spread like wildfire that the kolkhozes were about to be disbanded,¹⁰ and peasant households went on appropriating land from the farms and growing produce for personal consumption and black-market trade.¹¹ There was disgruntlement with the abject remuneration for farm-work. The same mutterings were heard in the towns, especially after the raising of food-ration prices in 1946.¹²

Stalin ordered his intimates ‘to deliver a strong blow’ at any talk about ‘democracy’, talk which he thought to be the unfortunate result of the USSR’s wartime alliance.¹³ He was striking before opposition got out of hand. No unifying political vision existed among the peasants; factory workers, low-ranking administrators, teachers and other professional people were equally vague about what needed to be done. It is true that bands of guerrillas challenged Soviet rule in the newly-annexed regions of the USSR — in western Ukraine they held out until the mid-1950s. But such resistance was rare in the older parts of the USSR. In Russia it was virtually non-existent, and only a very few clandestine dissentient groups were formed. These consisted mainly of students, who were quickly arrested. In any case, such students were committed to a purer version of Leninism than Stalin espoused: the communist dictatorship had lasted so long that young rebels framed their ideas in Marxist-Leninist categories. Lenin, the planner of dictatorship and terror, was misunderstood by such students as a libertarian. The groups anyway failed to move beyond a preliminary discussion of their ideas before being caught and arrested by the security police.

Most other citizens who detested Stalin were grumblers rather than insurrectionaries. Police phone-tappers recorded the following conversation between General Rybalchenko and General Gordov:

Rybalchenko: So this is the life that has begun: you just lie down and die! Pray God that there won’t be another poor harvest.

Gordov: But where will the harvest come from? You need to sow something for that!

Rybalchenko: The winter wheat has been a failure, of course. And yet Stalin has travelled by train. Surely he must have looked out of the window? Absolutely everyone says openly how everyone is discontented with life. On the trains, in fact everywhere, it’s what everyone’s saying.¹⁴

This loose talk led to their arrest. But no matter how many persons were caught in this way, the resentment against the regime persisted. A local party secretary, P. M. Yemelyanov, gave this confidential warning: ‘There are going to be revolts and uprisings, and the workers will say: “What were we fighting for?” ’¹⁵ Even Stalin seemed to feel the need to choose his words with circumspection. In a speech on 24 May 1945 he acknowledged that society had had every right in mid-1941 ‘to say to the Government: you have not justified our expectations; get out of here altogether and we shall install another government which will conclude a peace with Germany’.¹⁶

Yet this was a long way from being a fulsome confession. On the contrary, he was inculpating the Soviet government as if he himself had not led that government. Nor did he relent in his practical campaigns of mass repression. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, western Ukraine were subjected to a resumed quota of deportations. Those persons who had collaborated with the German occupying forces were imprisoned, and the Soviet security forces hunted down ‘bandits’ and ‘kulaks’.¹⁷ The arrests were not confined to overt opponents. Prominent among the victims were also persons guilty of no other crime than the fact that they belonged to the political, economic and cultural élites of the local nationality. According to the police files, 142,000 citizens of the three formerly independent Baltic states were deported in 1945–9. Most of the deportees were dispatched to ‘special settlements’ in the Russian far north, Siberia and Kazakhstan.¹⁸

This meant that Russians, too, came to learn of Stalin’s continued application of terror even though the violence was at its most intense outside the RSFSR in the USSR’s ‘borderlands’. Many gained such knowledge still more directly if they happened to have had relatives taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht. Vlasov, the Russian Liberation Army leader, fell into Soviet captivity and was hanged. His soldiers were either shot or sent to labour camps, usually for terms of between fifteen and twenty-five years.¹⁹ But Stalin did not restrict himself to military renegades. The infamous Order No. 270 that defined as a traitor anyone taken captive by the Germans had not been repealed. Emaciated by their suffering in Hitler’s concentration camps, 2,775,700 former Red Army soldiers were taken into Soviet custody upon their repatriation. After being interrogated by the Department of Verification-Filtration Camps, about half of them were transferred into the Gulag system.²⁰

The usual pressure to guarantee a supply of inmates to the forced-labour camps had been intensified by Stalin’s predictable decision to catch up with the Americans and British in nuclear-bomb capacity.²¹ He had put Beria in charge of the bomb research project, commanding him to build testing-sites, to assemble scientists (including captured Germans), to collect American secrets by means of the Soviet spy network, to discover and mine the necessary natural resources. Hundreds of thousands of Gulag prisoners were deployed in the secret quest for uranium.²²

The technology of war had changed, and Stalin’s simple response was to want the USSR to stay abreast of the transformation. Yet even Stalin perceived that several major political and economic questions did not offer easy answers. Debate was allowed in his inner circle of leaders about the difficulties; academics and journalists were also allowed, within prescribed limits, to offer their opinions to the leadership in books, journals and newspapers. Such deliberations, especially in 1945–7, were lively enough to strengthen the hope among some of the participants that Stalin might be contemplating a permanent softening of his political style. These were, as the last tsar had said in 1895 about projects for reform, ‘senseless dreams’. The one-party, one-ideology state; the retention of the peoples of the USSR and Eastern Europe under Soviet imperial control; the Stalinist personal dictatorship: these basic features of the compound of the Soviet order as modified in the course of Stalin’s rule were held firmly beyond the scope of permissible discussion.

Yet some questions of immense importance had to be kept under collective review: even Stalin did not trust himself to anticipate everything. In foreign policy, he felt nervous about the USA’s ambitions. Potential flashpoints in Soviet-American relations existed not only in Japan, China and Iran but also in Europe. The Soviet leadership had to decide whether to support revolutionary movements in France, Italy and Greece. Jenö Varga, Director of the Institute of the World Economy and World Politics, urged caution and argued that a parliamentary road to communism was in any case a realistic possibility in Western Europe. By contrast, Politburo member Zhdanov argued that revolutionary movements should be encouraged wherever they might arise — and he warmed to the Yugoslav communist leaders who criticized the slowness of the political and economic changes being imposed by communist parties elsewhere in Eastern Europe.²³

Issues at home were equally vexatious. The problems of state organization that had arisen in the 1930s remained unresolved. The party’s role was yet again controversial and this time the protagonists were Zhdanov and Malenkov. Zhdanov wished to restore the party’s role in selecting governmental cadres and in mobilizing society whereas Malenkov opposed an increase in the party’s authority and wished to keep the party organized along the lines of branches of the economy.²⁴ Their dispute was only in part a competition to become Stalin’s prime adjutant. It was also the result of the inherent structural tensions within the one-party state.

This was not the only dissension in the Soviet political leadership. On industry, there was severe disagreement about regional policy. At first it was the Politburo’s policy to accelerate the development of Siberia and central Asia; but Molotov and Voznesenski apparently preferred to concentrate resources in the traditional European manufacturing regions where the costs of production were smaller and where the population was greater. And while the priority for capital-goods production was fixed, the precise proportion of expenditure to be left for the requirements of civilian consumers was contentious. Mikoyan advocated the boosting of light-industrial production. On agriculture, Khrushchëv felt the collective farms were too small and called for amalgamations that would lead to the establishment of ‘agrotowns’. Andreev argued the opposite, proposing the division of each farm’s work-force into several groups (or ‘links’) that would take responsibility for particular tasks.²⁵

The agenda for deliberations at the highest level was therefore large. Its major items included the following: the military and diplomatic competition with the USA; the security of Soviet frontiers; Eastern Europe; the communist movement in Western Europe; industrial planning and investment; agricultural organization; the scope of national and cultural self-expression. Decision-making was complicated because the various items intersected with each other. And this was not a static situation: the post-war world was in rapid flux.

Soviet politicians operated in an environment that was exceedingly unsettling. Molotov, Zhdanov, Malenkov, Khrushchëv, Voznesenski and Beria had to compete for Stalin’s approval. After the war it was Zhdanov who was his favourite. Zhdanov returned to the Central Committee Secretariat in Moscow in 1946. He brought with him the prestige of a leader who had spent time in Leningrad while it was under siege by the Germans. Malenkov’s career went into eclipse. But Zhdanov, sodden with drink, died in August 1948. An alliance was formed between Malenkov and Beria. Together they plotted the demise of Zhdanov’s protégés. Practically the entire Leningrad and Gorki party leadership was executed in 1949. Even Politburo member and native Leningrader Voznesenski, who had argued against some of Zhdanov’s proposals, was incarcerated. Voznesenski was shot in 1950. Civilian political struggle was resuming its bloody pre-war characteristics.

Zhdanov’s scheme for a resurgent communist party was abandoned and the authority of the economic agencies of the government was confirmed. The USSR was still a one-party state; but the party as such did not rule it. The Politburo rarely met. No Party Congress was held after the war until 1952. The party was pushed back into the role proposed for it by Kaganovich in the mid-1930s: it was meant to supervise the implementation of policy, not to initiate it and certainly not to interfere in the detailed operation of governmental bodies. The infrequency of meetings of the party’s supreme bodies — the Congress, the Central Committee and the Politburo — meant that Stalin no longer accorded great significance to its tasks of supervision.

In any case, Zhdanov had not challenged the priority of the capital-goods sector, which in 1945–50 amounted to eighty-eight per cent of all industrial investment.²⁶ The Fourth Five-Year Plan’s first draft, which had taken consumers’ aspirations into more favourable consideration than at any time since the NEP, was ripped up.²⁷ Capital goods output, including armaments, rose by eighty-three per cent in the half-decade after the Second World War.²⁸ This towering priority was enhanced in subsequent years. The budget of 1952 provided for a forty-five per cent increase of output for the armed forces in comparison with two years before.²⁹ Meanwhile the Soviet team of nuclear scientists led by Sergei Kurchatov and controlled by Beria had exploded an A-bomb at the Semipalatinsk testing-site in Kazakhstan in August 1949. Beria was so relieved at the sight of the billowing mushroom cloud that he momentarily abandoned his haughtiness and gave Kurchatov a hug.³⁰

The priority for the armed forces meant that factory production for the ordinary consumer was starved of investment. Although output in this sector was doubled in the course of the Fourth Five-Year Plan, this was an increase from the pitifully low level of wartime.³¹ Machine-tools, guns and bombs took precedence over shoes, coats, chairs and toys. The supply of food was also terribly inadequate. The grain harvest reaching the barns and warehouses in 1952 was still only seventy-seven per cent of the 1940 harvest.³²

Schemes were introduced to raise additional revenues. Stalin sucked back citizens’ personal savings into the state’s coffers on 16 December 1947 by announcing a nine tenths devaluation of the rouble. Extra taxes, too, were invented. Among them was a charge on the peasant household for each fruit tree in its kitchen garden. Owners of cattle, pigs, sheep and hens were also subjected to punitive taxation. In 1954, fully a year after Stalin’s death, the monthly pay for a typical kolkhoznik remained lower than a sixth of the earnings of the average factory worker: a miserable sixteen roubles.³³ To be sure, many kolkhozniki found other means of income; and some urban inhabitants were able to eke out their miserable wages by means of land allotments on which they grew potatoes and even kept the odd chicken. But conditions were generally abysmal. There was famine in Ukraine and Moldavia, a famine so grievous that cases of cannibalism occurred.

Many rural families elsewhere were left with so little grain after delivering their quotas to the government that they themselves had to buy flour in the towns. Innumerable farms in any case failed to comply with the state’s procurement plan. Agriculture recovery had hardly begun. This meant that it was not unusual for kolkhozniki to receive no payment whatsoever from one year’s end to the next. Such individuals would have no money to buy things from shops.

In the towns, too, there was great hardship. Stalin’s ministers planned a programme of apartment construction (for which his successors took exclusive credit) but little was achieved in the early post-war years. The Soviet welfare state was not universal: social misfits and mentally-unstable individuals were neglected; and pensions were set at a derisory level. Furthermore, they were claimable by only a million people as late as 1950. Certain occupations in the towns offered just twenty roubles monthly, considerably below the poverty level as defined by the United Nations. Admittedly these were the worst-paid jobs. But official statistics also indicated that the average urban wage in 1952 was still no higher than it had been in 1928. Pressure therefore existed not only to get a job but also to seek promotion to higher posts.³⁴

And a similar economic system was simultaneously being imposed on many other countries by the Soviet armed forces and security police and Eastern Europe’s fraternal communist parties. The decisions of Allied political leaders at Moscow and Yalta in 1945 divided the European continent into broad zones of military responsibility; there had also been an assumption that the respective basic interests of the USSR, the USA, the UK and France would be safeguarded after the last shot of the Second World War had been fired.

The Yugoslav communist fighter Milovan Djilas has given a record of Stalin’s musings: ‘This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system on it. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.’³⁵ Initially Stalin had to act stealthily since until August 1949 the USSR, unlike the USA, had no A-bomb at its disposal. Initially he therefore geared his diplomacy to protecting his gains in Eastern Europe, where his forces had occupied Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary and eastern Germany in 1944–5. Among his goals was the arrangement of communist parties’ entrance to government in these countries. Having conquered an outer empire, he intended to reinforce his sway over it; and many Soviet citizens, however much they distrusted him, were proud that the USSR had defeated mighty Germany and had to all intents and purposes acquired an empire stretching across half the continent. Russians in particular had a pride in this military achievement and imperial consolidation lasted through to and beyond the last years of the USSR’s existence.

Still needing to avoid trouble with the Western Allies, he imposed restraints upon the Italian, French and Greek communist parties in the West. These parties had played the major role in the resistance to Nazism in their countries, and several communist leaders assumed that military victory would be followed by political revolution. Palmiro Togliatti consulted with Stalin before returning to Italy after the war,³⁶ and Maurice Thorez anyway accepted anything laid down in the Kremlin for France. In Greece, the communists ignored Stalin’s cautionary instructions and tried to seize power. They paid dearly for their insubordination. Stalin ostentatiously stood aside while the USA and the UK aided the Greek monarchist forces in their defeat of communist guerrillas.

But what to do about the countries directly under Soviet occupation? At the Potsdam Conference of Allied leaders in July 1945 Stalin, on his last ever trip outside the USSR, secured the territorial settlement he demanded. The boundaries of Lithuania and Ukraine were extended westward at the expense of pre-war Poland while Poland was compensated by the gift of land previously belonging to the north-eastern region of Germany.³⁷ Yet the Western Allies refused to recognize the USSR’s annexation of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Wishing to affirm that the post-war boundaries would be permanent, Stalin therefore decided that Königsberg and the rest of East Prussia would belong not to Lithuania or Poland but to the RSFSR. Consequently a ‘Russian’ territory was to act as a partial wedge between Poland and Lithuania. The RSFSR would have a military base and an all-season port at Königsberg — now renamed as Kaliningrad — in order to deter any attempt to redraw the map of Europe.

The Soviet occupying authorities also inserted communists into the coalition government formed in Poland at the war’s end. The same process occurred in Hungary even though the communist party received only seventeen per cent of the votes in the November 1945 election. Elections in Czechoslovakia were delayed until May 1946, when the communists won nearly two fifths of the vote and were the most successful party. A coalition government led by communist Clement Gottwald was established in Prague.

In all countries where the Red Army had fought there were similar arrangements: communists shared power with socialist and agrarian parties and the appearance of democratic procedures was maintained. In reality there was unremitting persecution of the leading non-communist politicians. Everywhere in Eastern Europe the Soviet security police manipulated the situation in favour of the communists. Defamatory propaganda, jerrymandering and arrests were the norm. Teams of police operatives were sent to catch the large number of people who had actively collaborated with the Nazis. In Germany a Soviet organization was installed to transfer industrial machinery to the USSR. Local communist leaders were carefully supervised from the Kremlin. They were selected for their loyalty to Stalin; and they in turn knew that, with the exception of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, their positions of influence in their own countries would be fragile in the absence of support from the Soviet armed forces.

Yet these same leaders were aware of the awful effects of Stalin’s policies on his own USSR. Polish communists wanted to avoid mass agricultural collectivization; and even the Yugoslav comrades, who generally rebuked the East European communist parties for a lack of revolutionary resolve, refused to de-kulakize their villages. Several parties, including the Poles, Hungarians and Czechoslovaks, aimed to form left-of-centre governmental coalitions; there were few proponents of the need for the immediate formation of one-party states. The Soviet road to socialism was not regarded by them as wholly desirable.³⁸

Stalin went along with these divergences from Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism in 1945–6 while the general world situation remained in flux. But he was unlikely to tolerate heterodoxy for long, and it was only a matter of time before he moved to strap an organizational strait-jacket around European communist parties. Furthermore, in 1946 there was a hardening of the USA’s foreign policy. President Truman resolved to contain any further expansion of Soviet political influence; he also decided in 1947, on the suggestion of his Secretary of State George Marshall, to offer loans for the economic reconstruction of Europe, East and West, on terms that would provide the USA with access to their markets. Stalin was aghast at the prospect. As he saw things, the problem in Eastern Europe was that there was too little communism: a resurgent market economy was the last thing he wanted to see there. The Marshall Plan was regarded by him as an economic device to destroy Soviet military and political hegemony over Eastern Europe.

Relations between the USSR and the former Allies had worsened. The USA, Britain and France were resisting demands for continued reparations to be made to the USSR by regions of Germany unoccupied by Soviet forces, and Germany’s partition into two entirely separate administrative zones was becoming a reality. Stalin feared that the western zone was about to be turned into a separate state that would re-arm itself with the USA’s encouragement and would belong to an anti-Soviet alliance. In the Far East, too, the USA seemed interested mainly in rehabilitating Japan as an economic partner. As in the 1930s, Stalin felt threatened from both the Pacific Ocean and central Europe.

Stalin could do little about the Far East except build up his military position on Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands acquired at the end of the Second World War; and in March 1947 he decided to withdraw from northern Iran rather than risk confrontation with Britain and the USA. But in Europe he was more bullish. On 22 September 1947 he convoked a conference of communist parties from the USSR, Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, France and Italy. The venue was Szklarska Poręba in eastern Poland. Soviet politicians dominated the proceedings. Stalin was not present, but was kept closely informed by his Politburo associates Zhdanov and Malenkov about what was said. The organizational aim was to re-establish an international communist body, which would be called the Information Bureau. Several delegates were uneasy about the proposal and stressed the need to co-operate with non-communists in their country and to avoid agricultural collectivization.

But in the end they agreed to the creation of an Information Bureau, which quickly became known as Cominform. Ostensibly it was a very different body from the defunct Comintern: Cominform was to be based not in Moscow but in Belgrade; it was to involve only the parties present at the Conference and to have no formal control over these parties.³⁹ Yet Stalin clearly intended to use Cominform so as to impose his will on the communist leaderships with delegates at the Conference.

In 1948, as he continued to harden his purposes towards the communist parties in Eastern Europe, he sanctioned the replacement of the various coalition governments with communist dictatorships. One-party communist states were formed by a mixture of force, intimidation and electoral fraud; and the Soviet security police operated as overseers. If Ukraine and other Soviet republics were the inner empire ruled from Moscow, the new states were the outer imperial domains. They were officially designated ‘people’s democracies’. This term was invented to emphasize that the East European states had been established without the civil wars which had occurred in Russia.⁴⁰ Thus the Soviet Army inhibited any counter-revolution and the social and economic reconstruction could proceed without obstruction. The term also served to stress the subordination of the East European states to the USSR; it was a none too discreet way of affirming imperial pride, power and cohesion.

The main impediment to cohesion in the politics of Eastern Europe was constituted not by anti-communists but by the Yugoslav communist regime. Its leader Josip Broz Tito was a contradictory figure. On the one hand, Tito still refused to de-kulakize his peasantry; on the other, he castigated the slow pace of the introduction of communism to other countries in Eastern Europe. Both aspects of Tito’s stance implied a criticism of Stalin’s policies for Eastern Europe after the Second World War. Stalin was accustomed to receiving homage from the world’s communists whereas Tito tried to treat himself as Stalin’s equal.

There was also a danger for Stalin that Tito’s independent attitude might spread to other countries in Eastern Europe. In 1946–7 Tito had been canvassing for the creation of a federation of Yugoslavia and other communist states in south-eastern Europe. Stalin eventually judged that such a federation would be hard for him to control. Tito also urged the need for active support to be given to the Greek communist attempt at revolution. This threatened to wreck the understandings reached between the USSR and the Western Allies about the territorial limits of direct Soviet influence. And so Stalin, in June 1948, ordered Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform. Tito was subjected to tirades of vilification unprecedented since the death of Trotski. This communist leader of his country’s resistance against Hitler was now described in Pravda as the fascist hireling of the USA.

In the same month there were diplomatic clashes among the Allies when Stalin announced a blockade of Berlin. The German capital, which lay in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany, had been divided into four areas administered separately by the USSR, the USA, Britain and France. Stalin was responding to an American attempt to introduce the Deutschmark as the unit of currency in Berlin, an attempt he regarded as designed to encroach on the USSR’s economic prerogatives in the Soviet zone. His blockade, he expected, would swiftly produce the requested concessions from the Western powers. But no such thing happened. After several weeks he had to back down because the Americans and her allies airlifted food supplies to their areas in the German capital. Neither side in the dispute wished to go to war over Berlin, and tensions subsided. But lasting damage had been done to relations between the USSR and USA.

The expulsion of the Yugoslavs from the fraternity of world communism and the recurrent clashes with the USA terrified the communist governments of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Albania, Romania and Hungary into servility. None was allowed to accept Marshall Aid. Instead, from January 1949 they had to assent to the formation of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon). In October 1949 Stalin also decided that, if the USA was going to dominate western Germany, he would proceed to form a German Democratic Republic in the zone occupied by Soviet armed forces. Private economic enterprise, cultural pluralism and open political debate were eliminated throughout Eastern Europe. Exceptions persisted. For example, agricultural collectivization was only partially implemented in Poland. But in most ways the Soviet historical model was applied with ruthlessless to all these countries.

Furthermore, Władisław Gomułka, who had shown an independent turn of mind at the Cominform Conference in 1947, was pushed out of power in Warsaw and arrested. Another delegate to the Conference, Hungary’s Internal Affairs Minister László Rajk, was arrested in June 1949. Bulgarian former deputy premier Trajcho Kostov was imprisoned in December 1949 and Rudolf Slánsky, Czechoslovakia’s Party General Secretary, was imprisoned in December 1952. Of these leaders only Gomułka escaped execution. Bloody purges were applied against thousands of lower party and government officials in each of these countries from the late 1940s through to 1953.

Soviet and American governments used the most intemperate language against each other. At the First Cominform Conference in September 1947 a resolution was agreed that the USA was assembling an alliance of imperialist, anti-democratic forces against the USSR and the democratic forces. On the other side, the Western powers depicted the USSR as the vanguard of global communist expansion. Soviet self-assertion increased in subsequent years after the successful testing of a Soviet A-bomb in August 1949 had deprived the Americans and British of their qualitative military superiority. Stalin’s confidence rose, too, because of the conquest of power in Beijing by the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong in November. The People’s Republic of China quickly signed a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance. A great axis of communism stretched from Stettin on the Baltic to Shanghai in the Far East. A quarter of the globe was covered by states professing adherence to Marxism-Leninism.

Since 1947, furthermore, Stalin had begun to license the French and Italian communist parties to take a more militant line against their governments. He remained convinced that ‘history’ was on the side of world communism and was willing to consider schemes that might expand the area occupied by communist states.

One such possibility was presented in Korea in 1950. Korea had been left divided between a communist North and a capitalist South since the end of the Second World War. The Korean communist leader Kim Il-Sung proposed to Stalin that communist forces should take over the entire country. Stalin did not demur, and gave support to Kim in a civil war that could eventually have involved the forces of the USSR and the USA facing each other across battlefields in the Far East. Mao Zedong, too, was in favour. Given the political sanction and military equipment he had requested, Kim Il-Sung attacked southern Korea in June 1950. Foolishly the Soviet Union temporarily withdrew its representative from the debate on the Korean civil war at the Security Council of the United Nations. Thus Stalin robbed himself of the veto on the United Nations’ decision to intervene on the southern side with American military power. China supplied forces to assist Kim Il-Sung. A terrible conflict ensued.⁴¹

Kim Il-Sung seemed invincible as he hastened southwards, but then the arrival of the Americans turned the tide. By mid-1951 there was a bloody stalemate across Korea. Soviet forces were not seriously involved; but President Truman justifiably inferred that the USSR had rendered material assistance to Kim. Millions of soldiers on both sides were killed in 1952–3.

But how had the USSR and the USA allowed themselves to come so close to direct armed collision so soon after a world war in which they had been each other’s indispensable allies? The apologists for either side put the respective cases robustly. Indeed it took no great skill to present the actions of either of them as having been responsible for the onset of the Cold War. The Americans had acted precipitately. They formed a separate state in western Germany; they flaunted the possession of their nuclear weaponry; they built up Japan as an ally and established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Soviet Union had also behaved provocatively. It had terrorized Eastern Europe, delayed its withdrawal from Iran and supported Kim Il-Sung. Each successive crisis left the two sides ever more intransigent in their postures towards each other. Clashes between American and Soviet diplomats became normal over every matter of global politics.

Yet it would have taken little short of a miracle to avoid a Cold War. The USSR and the USA were states with diametrically-opposite interests. Both states, indeed, aimed to expand their global power and were not too scrupulous about the methods used. They also had opposing ideologies. Each thought the principles of human betterment were on its side. Each was armed to the teeth. Each operated in an environment of considerable ignorance about the politicians and society of the other side. So was the balance of responsibility equal? No, because the USSR depended much more directly than its rival upon militarism, terror and injustice to get its way. There was as much financial blandishment and political persuasion as manipulativeness and force at work in the American domination of Western Europe. But manipulativeness and force, involving systematic savagery, was the predominant method of the USSR in Eastern Europe.

The USSR and Eastern Europe were an armed camp confronting the Western Allies. The USSR itself was an armed camp charged with maintaining the subjugation of Eastern Europe. In the USSR, the Soviet political order applied the most brutal repression to its society. Stalin’s domestic order was inescapably militaristic; and only by maintaining such a posture in its foreign relations could it contrive to justify and conserve its power at home. Stalin expected to find trouble in the world and was not averse to seeking it out.

16 The Despot and his Masks

Stalin could not dominate by terror alone. Needing the support of the elites in the government, the party, the army and the security police, he systematically sought favour among them. The privileges and power of functionaries were confirmed and the dignity of institutions was enhanced. By keeping the gulf between the rulers and the ruled, Stalin hoped to prevent the outbreak of popular opposition. What is more, he tried to increase his specific appeal to ethnic Russians by reinforcing a form of Russian nationalism alongside Marxism-Leninism; and Stalin cultivated his image as a leader whose position at the helm of the Soviet state was vital for the country’s military security and economic development.

Such measures could delay a crisis for the regime; they were not a permanent solution. In any case Stalin did not adhere to the measures consistently. He was far too suspicious of his associates and the country’s élites to provide them with the entirely stable circumstances that would have alleviated the strains in politics, the economy and society. His health deteriorated after the Second World War. His holidays in Abkhazia became longer, and he sustained his efforts much more concentratedly in international relations than in domestic policy. But he could intervene whenever he wanted in any public deliberations. If an open debate took place on any big topic, it was because he had given permission. If a problem developed without reaction by central government and party authorities, it was either because Stalin did not think it very important or did not think it amenable to solution. He remained the dictator.

He so much avoided flamboyance that he refrained from giving a single major speech in the period between mid-April 1948 and October 1952. At first he declined the title of Generalissimus pressed upon him by Politburo colleagues. In a characteristic reference to himself in the third person, he wondered aloud: ‘Do you want comrade Stalin to assume the rank of Generalissimus? Why does comrade Stalin need this? Comrade Stalin doesn’t need this.’¹

But assume it he did, and he would have been angry if the torrents of praise had dried up. His name appeared as an authority in books on everything from politics and culture to the natural sciences. The Soviet state hymn, which he had commissioned in the war, contained the line: ‘Stalin brought us up.’ In the film The Fall of Berlin he was played by an actor with luridly ginger hair and a plastic mask who received the gratitude of a multinational crowd which joyfully chanted: ‘Thank you, Stalin!’ By 1954, 706 million copies of Stalin’s works had been published.² In 1949 a parade was held in Red Square to celebrate his seventieth birthday and his facial image was projected into the evening sky over the Kremlin. His official biography came out in a second edition, which he had had amended so as to enhance the account of his derring-do under Nicholas II. His height was exaggerated in newsreels by clever camera work. The pockmarks on his face were airbrushed away. This perfect ‘Stalin’ was everywhere while the real Stalin hid himself from view.

Among the peoples of the USSR he strained to identify himself with the ethnic Russians. In private he talked in his native tongue with those of his intimates who were Georgian; and even his deceased wife Nadezhda Allilueva had Georgian ancestors.³ He ran his supper parties like a Georgian host (although most such hosts would not have thrown tomatoes at his guests as Stalin did).⁴ But publicly his origins embarrassed him after a war which had intensified the self-awareness and pride of Russians; and his biography referred just once to his own father’s nationality.⁵ Stalin placed the Russian nation on a pedestal: ‘Among all peoples of our country it is the leading people.’⁶ Official favour for things Russian went beyond precedent. The lexicographers were told to remove foreign loan-words from the dictionaries. For instance, the Latin-American tango was renamed ‘the slow dance’.⁷ The history of nineteenth-century science was ransacked and — glory be! — it was found that practically every major invention from the bicycle to the television had been the brainchild of an ethnic Russian.

Simultaneously the Soviet authorities re-barricaded the USSR from alien influences. Polina Zhemchuzhina, Molotov’s wife, was imprisoned for greeting the Israeli emissary Golda Meir too warmly. The poet Boris Pasternak was terrified when the Russian-born British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, then serving as a diplomat in Moscow, paid him a visit at home. Stalin expressed the following opinion to Nikita Khrushchëv: ‘We should never allow a foreigner to fly across the Soviet Union.’⁸ After the war, Kliment Voroshilov placed a ban on the reporting of Canadian ice-hockey results.⁹ Great Russia always had to be the world’s champion nation. A propaganda campaign was initiated to stress that there should be no ‘bowing down’ before the achievements and potentiality of the West.

All national groups suffered, but some suffered more than others. The cultures of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians — who had only recently been re-conquered — were ravaged. The same occurred to the Romanian-speaking Moldavians; in their case even their language was emasculated: first it was equipped with a Cyrillic alphabet and then its vocabulary compulsorily acquired loan-words from Russian so as to distinguish it strongly from Romanian.¹⁰ The Ukrainian language was decreasingly taught to Ukrainian-speaking children in the RSFSR.¹¹ More sinister still was the experience of a philologist who was imprisoned simply for stating that some Finno-Ugric languages had more declensions than Russian. Historiography became ever more imperialist. Shamil, the leader of the nineteenth-century rebellion in the North Caucasus against tsarism, was depicted unequivocally as a reactionary figure. Anyone dead or alive who since time immemorial had opposed the Russian state was prone to be denounced.¹²

The nationality which underwent the greatest trauma were the Jews. The Anti-Fascist Jewish Committee was closed down without explanation, and its leader and outstanding Yiddish singer Solomon Mikhoels was murdered in a car crash on Stalin’s orders. Several prominent Soviet politicians who happened to be Jewish, such as Semën Lozovski, disappeared into prison.

Stalin, starting with his article on the national question in 1913, refused to describe the Jews as a nation since, unlike the Ukrainians or Armenians, they did not inhabit a particular historic territory. In 1934 he sought to give them a territory of their own by establishing a ‘Jewish Autonomous Region’ in Birobidzhan and asking for volunteers to populate it. But Birobidzhan lay in one of the coldest regions of eastern Siberia. Little enthusiasm was invoked by the project, and after the war there was tentative talk about turning Crimea instead into a Jewish homeland. But in the 1940s Stalin’s unease about the Jews had increased to the point that he cursed his daughter Svetlana for going out with a Jewish boyfriend. Particularly annoying to him was the admiration of many Soviet Jews for the Zionist movement which had founded the state of Israel in 1948. Stalin responded by denouncing ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘rootlessness’. He ignored the fact that Marxists had traditionally opposed nationalism in favour of cosmopolitan attitudes. Restrictions were introduced on the access of Jews to university education and professional occupations. Soviet textbooks ceased to mention that Karl Marx had been Jewish.

Russian chauvinism was rampant. The first party secretary, the police chief and the governmental chairmen in other Soviet republics such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan were invariably of Russian nationality. There was similar discrimination in appointments to other important public offices. Russians were trusted because they, more than any other nation, were thought to have a stake in the retention of the USSR in its existing boundaries.

This imperialism, however, was not taken to its fullest imaginable extent. Ordinary Russians lived as meanly as Ukrainians and Kazakhs; indeed many were worse off than Georgians and other peoples with higher per capita levels of output of meat, vegetables and fruit than Russia. Furthermore, Stalin continued to limit the expression of Russian nationhood. Despite having distorted Marxism-Leninism, he also clung to several of its main tenets. He continued to hold the Russian Orthodox Church in subservience, and practising Christians were debarred from jobs of responsibility throughout the USSR. Stalin also exercised selectivity towards Russian literary classics and allowed no nostalgia about pre-revolutionary village traditions. His version of Russian national identity was so peculiar a mixture of traditions as to be virtually his own invention. The quintessence of Russia, for Stalin, was simply a catalogue of his own predilections: militarism, xenophobia, industrialism, urbanism and gigantomania.

It also embraced a commitment to science. But as usual, Stalin gave things a political twist. His spokesman Zhdanov, despite negligible training, breezily denounced relativity theory, cybernetics and quantum mechanics as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘reactionary’. Crude, ideologically-motivated interventions were made in the research institutes for the natural sciences. The relativist concepts of Einstein were an irritant to the monolithism of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. Zhdanov proclaimed the axiomatic status of absolute notions of space, time and matter; he insisted that an unshifting objective truth existed for all organic and inorganic reality.¹³

Persecution of scholarship was accompanied by the continued promotion of cranks. By the 1940s the pseudo-scientist Lysenko was claiming to have developed strains of wheat that could grow within the Arctic circle. His gruff manner was attractive to Stalin. The result was disaster for professional biology: any refusal to condone Lysenkoite hypotheses was punished by arrest. Where biology led, chemistry, psychology and linguistics quickly followed. Physics escaped this mauling only because the scientists employed on the Soviet nuclear weapon project convinced Beria that the USSR would not acquire an A-bomb unless they were allowed to use Einstein’s concepts. Stalin muttered to Beria: ‘Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later.’¹⁴ This grudging indulgence proved the rule. Researchers of all kinds, in the arts as well as in the sciences, were treated as technicians investigating problems strictly within the guidelines prescribed by the state authorities.

Stalin made this crystal clear when he intruded himself into erudite debates among linguisticians. In his quirky booklet of 1950, Marxism and Questions of Linguistics, he took it upon himself to insist that the Russian language originated in the provinces of Kursk and Orël.¹⁵ The entire intelligentsia was constrained to applaud the booklet as an intellectual breakthrough and to apply its wisdom to other fields of scholarship. Writers scrambled to outdo each other in praise of Stalin’s injunctions.

The arts suffered alongside the sciences and the wartime cultural semi-truce was brought to an end. Zhdanov again led the assault, describing the poet Anna Akhmatova as ‘half-nun, half-whore’. The short-story writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, who had avoided trouble by writing predominantly for children, was also castigated. Shostakovich could no longer have his symphonies performed. Zhdanov noted that several artists had withheld explicit support for the official ideology, and he announced that this ‘idea-lessness’ (bezideinost) would no longer be tolerated. Essentially he was demanding overt adherence to a single set of ideas, ‘Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism’. The various official organizations of creative artists were trundled into action. Tikhon Khrennikov, chairman of the Union of Musicians, was rivalled only by Alexander Fadeev, leader of the Union of Writers, in fawning before Zhdanov’s judgements on particular composers, painters, poets and film directors. Such cheerleaders cried that the arts should be the conveyor-belt for the regime’s commands.

Only rarely did Stalin intervene in Zhdanov’s campaign for Marxist-Leninist compliance. But when he did, his effect was terrifying. For instance, in 1947 Stalin, Zhdanov and Molotov paid a visit to the director Sergei Eisenstein, who was filming the second instalment of his two-part depiction of Ivan the Terrible. To Stalin’s mind, Eisenstein had failed to stress that Tsar Ivan’s terror against the aristocracy had been justified; he urged Eisenstein to ‘show that it was necessary to be ruthless’. The intimidated director — who already had a chronic cardiac complaint — asked for further detailed advice; but Stalin would only reply, in false self-deprecation: ‘I’m not giving you instructions but expressing the comments of a spectator.’ Eisenstein was deeply scared by the conversation. He died a few months later.¹⁶

Meanwhile only a few works that were critical of social and economic conditions were permitted. Among the most interesting were the sketches of collective-farm life published by Valentin Ovechkin under the title Rural Daily Rounds. And so Stalin, probably at Khrushchëv’s instigation, permitted a portrait of the troubles of contemporary farming to appear in Pravda. This seepage through the Stalinist cultural dam occurred solely because Politburo members themselves were in dispute about agrarian policy. For the most part, in any case, official propagandists remained utterly self-satisfied, asserting that all Soviet citizens were living in comfort. A massive cookbook was produced in 1952, The Book of Delicious and Healthy Food, which took as its epigraph a quotation from Stalin: ‘The peculiar characteristic of our revolution consists in its having given the people not only freedom but also material goods as well as the opportunity of a prosperous and cultured life.’¹⁷

The beneficiaries of the Soviet order were not the ‘people’, not the workers, kolkhozniki and office-clerks. Even doctors, engineers and teachers were poorly paid. But one group in society was certainly indebted to Stalin. This was constituted by the high and middling ranks of the bureaucracy in the ministries, the party, the armed forces and the security organs. The material assets of functionaries were small by the standards of the rich in the West. But they knew how hard life was for the rest of society; they also understood that, if they were unlucky in some way in their career, they might suddenly enter prison despite being innocent of any crime. Immediate pleasure was the priority for them.¹⁸

The tone of their lifestyle was set by Politburo members as the ballet and the opera were given the imprimatur of official approval. Stalin patronized the Bolshoi Theatre, favouring its singers with coveted awards. The families of the Politburo went to the spa-town Pyatigorsk in the North Caucasus to take the waters. Occasionally they went to Karlovy Vary in Czechoslovakia. Flats were done up with wallpaper, lamps and chairs that were unobtainable in general stores such as GUM on Red Square. Special shops, special hospitals and special holiday-homes were available to persons of political importance. The compulsory fees that had been introduced in 1940 for pupils wishing to complete their secondary schooling meant that the proportion of working-class entrants to universities fell from forty-five per cent in 1935 to just above twenty-five by 1950.¹⁹ The central and local nomenklaturas were steadily turning into a hereditary social group.

But the nomenklatura did not yet flaunt their perks which had to be enjoyed discreetly in deference to the official ultimate aim of social egalitarianism. The Politburo took care to wear modest tunics or dull suits and hats. Ordinary people were given no hint about the tables creaking under the weight of caviar, sturgeon and roast lamb served at Kremlin banquets. Stalin himself lived fairly simply by the standards of several Politburo members; but even he had a governess for his daughter, a cook and several maids, a large dacha at Kuntsevo, an endless supply of Georgian wine and so few worries about money that most of his pay-packets lay unopened at the time of his death. Armed guards secured the privacy of the apartment blocks of the central political élite. Only the domestic servants, nannies and chauffeurs knew the truth about the lifestyle of the nomenklatura.

No wonder the emergent ruling class was determined to keep the foundations of the Soviet order in good repair. The mood of most functionaries was triumphalist; they felt that the USSR’s victory in the Second World War had demonstrated the superiority of communism over capitalism. They themselves were by now better qualified than before the war; they were more literate and numerate and most of them had completed their secondary education. But this in no way diminished their ideological crudity. Far from it: they did not distinguish between the interests of the regime and their own, and they would brook no challenge to their exploitative, repressive measures.

Stalin and his subordinates still talked about the eventual realization of communism, reaffirming that ‘the state will not last forever’.²⁰ But how to create a communist society was not a question under consideration. Far from it. The specific aspirations of the Soviet working class no longer figured prominently in Soviet propaganda. Workers in the rest of the world were called upon to engage in revolutionary struggle, but not in the USSR. At home the main requirement was for patriotism. Stalin implicitly laid down this line even in his Marxism and Questions of Linguistics. For example, he stressed the need to reject the notion that language was the product of class-based factors. This notion had conventionally been propagated by communist zealots who declared that words and grammar were the product of the social imperatives of the ruling class of a given society. Stalin instead wanted Soviet schoolchildren to admire the poetry of the nineteenth-century writer Alexander Pushkin without regard to his aristocratic background. Patriotism was to count for more than class.²¹

Here Stalin was clarifying the doctrines of communist conservatism prominent in his thought immediately before the Second World War. As ruler and theorist he wished to emphasize that no transformation in the Soviet order was going to happen in the foreseeable future. The attitudes, policies and practices of the post-war period were meant to endure for many more years.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in the discussions in 1950–51 among 240 leading scholars about a projected official textbook on political economy. Dauntlessly many of the 240 participants took issue with the premisses of current state policy.²² Stalin entered the debate in 1952 by producing yet another booklet, The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. He laid down that the objective ‘laws’ of economics could not be ignored by governmental planners and that there were limits on what was achievable by human will. This was a rebuff to S. G. Strumilin, who had been among his scholarly supporters at the end of the 1920s. On the other hand, Stalin offered no hope for the relaxation of economic policy. Taking issue with L. D. Yaroshenko, he argued that the primacy of capital goods in industrial planning was unalterable; and he reprimanded V. G. Venzher and A. V. Sanina for proposing the selling-off of the state-owned agricultural machinery to kolkhozes.²³

Stalin made no mention of topics such as the party, the government, elections, relations between classes, participation, international communism, authority or terror. On a single great subject he was expansive: global capitalism. He began by declaring that the economies of war-beaten Germany and Japan would soon recover. This accurate prediction was accompanied by a prognosis which has proved awry: namely that after communism’s victory in China, the market for global capitalism would be too limited for capitalist countries to be able to expand their economies. According to Stalin, the result would be yet another world war among the major non-communist powers, and he reaffirmed Lenin’s thesis on the inevitable recurrence of such wars so long as capitalist imperialism endured. Stalin repeated that the most acute danger of a Third World War occurring lay in rivalry between one capitalist coalition and another and not between communism and capitalism.²⁴

His plan was to go on and compose a broader work; but it is unlikely that he would have tugged such a work out of the rut worn by his previous writings. Stalin had accommodated his thought to the kind of Soviet state that already existed. He ruled over this state, but needed also to rule through it.

And so relations among the various public bodies by the late 1940s were entering a stable period by the measure of the past two decades. In order to indicate that revolutionary disturbance would not recur in the institutional framework, Stalin in 1946 renamed the People’s Commissariats as Ministries. He also ordered that the Red Army should henceforward be called the Soviet Army. This emphasis on continuity with the pre-revolutionary state was reinforced artistically. In 1948 the octocentenary of Moscow’s foundation was celebrated, and a statue of the medieval patriot Prince Dolgoruki was commissioned for erection on Gorki Street. Dolgoruki’s stern visage and muscular limbs gave monumental expression to Stalin’s vision of Soviet statehood.²⁵ Architects abetted the process. The power and dignity of the USSR acquired visible form in the vast granite buildings, topped by fairy-castle decorations. Six of them were constructed in central Moscow. A seventh was added in Warsaw, as if to emphasize Poland’s inclusion in the Soviet imperial domain.

And yet Stalin could not afford to allow institutional stabilization to be carried too far. As he well understood, his despotism required him periodically to re-agitate the elements in the Soviet order. In the post-war years there remained much to worry him. Those vertical clienteles and horizontal local groups were an object of continuing concern. So, too, was the fact that each of the great organizations of state was developing its own corporate identity. Soviet Army officers, like their predecessors in the tsarist forces, had begun to see themselves almost as a separate caste. The same phenomenon — albeit to a lesser degree — was visible in the economic ministries, the security police and the party.

Furthermore, the indoctrination of administrative, professional and intellectual functionaries was far from satisfactorily achieved. Some of them had ideas which sat uncomfortably alongside Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism and which came from a variety of sources. People were influenced by folk customs and by stories and memories recounted within families. Military veterans had had a glimpse of a different way of life abroad — and their conclusions were often to the USSR’s discredit. Many others continued to be motivated by national and religious traditions. Even officially-approved publications could give rise to un-Stalinist thoughts. Scientific textbooks propounded rules of investigation and validation at variance with Stalin’s claim that Marxism was based on premisses of eternal verity. Despite the heavy censorship exercised by Glavlit, moreover, citizens could glean unorthodox ideas from the approved Russian literary classics: Pushkin’s poems and Tolstoy’s novels teemed with discussions about religion, philosophy, nationhood and — last but not least — politics.

How well Stalin was acquainted with this information is unknown; but certainly he acted to rearrange the pattern of Soviet politics. His despotic will was undiminished. When his personal physician V. N. Vinogradov advised him to run down his official duties on grounds of failing health, Stalin had him arrested. Stalin did not want others to know that he was no longer up to the job. He also turned against the chief of his bodyguards N. S. Vlasik and his personal assistant A. N. Poskrëbyshev. His isolation increased. He rarely saw his beloved daughter Svetlana and had not remarried since his second wife’s death in 1932. Stalin trusted nobody.

As his suspicions grew, so too did his anti-Semitic tendencies. Several other Kremlin physicians were arrested in 1952 after being denounced by a certain Lidya Timashuk. Most of the thirteen detainees in this Doctors’ Plot had Jewish names and the tirades in the press against the ‘assassins in white coats’ produced an anti-Semitic hysteria. Individual Jews were subjected to verbal abuse by their neighbours throughout the country. It made no difference that many of them no longer practised their religion: the fact that their passports recorded them as Jewish made it easy for their persecutors to identify them. Meanwhile Stalin was giving confidential consideration to a scheme to round up all Jews and force them to live in the Jewish Autonomous Region established in eastern Siberia. Polina Zhemchuzhina, Molotov’s Jewish wife, was brought back from a camp and re-interrogated. The prospects for Soviet Jewry grew very bleak.

Nevertheless Jews were not Stalin’s sole intended victims. The treatment of Zhemchuzhina raised the question how long it might be before Politburo member Molotov, too, would share her fate. Stalin also appeared to be planning to move against past and present leaders of the Soviet security organs. Beria was a notable potential target. In 1951, arrests had begun of party and governmental officials of Mingrelian origin. Mingrelians are an ethnic division of the Georgian nation, and the fact that Beria was their most famous son was not coincidental. A bloody purge of some kind was in the offing even though its exact nature and scale remained unclear. Almost certainly something broader than the Leningrad purge of 1949 was in Stalin’s mind. The shadow cast over Molotov and Beria might well eventually reach many other persons at the apex of the Soviet state. It cannot be excluded that his ultimate purpose was to conduct yet another great bloody purge of personnel in government, party, army and police.

Probably his exact purposes will never be discovered. Certainly he did not confide them to the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952. The biggest event was the change of name from the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Stalin left it to Malenkov to give the Central Committee report; and the contributions not only by Malenkov but also by everyone else emphasized that Stalin’s wise leadership had their unanimous approval and gratitude. Apparently not the slightest disagreement on policy existed in the Kremlin.

Yet while offering obeisance to the officially-tabled resolutions, Stalin’s associates used indirect language to indicate their respective differences of opinion. Malenkov wanted greater attention to be paid to light-industrial investment and to the development of intensive methods of agriculture. Beria highlighted the desirability of treating the non-Russians more carefully. After propounding his agricultural schemes, Khrushchëv declared that every party member should display ‘vigilance’: a conventional code-word for support of political repression. A careful reader of the Pravda reports could therefore discern that tensions existed at the apex of the Soviet communist party. Stalin made no attempt to arbitrate among them. Most of the delegates anyway did not care: they had come to the Congress mainly to catch a glimpse of Stalin and to pass the resolutions with unanimity. At the very mention of Stalin’s name they applauded, and several times in the course of the Congress they gave him standing ovations.

Only at the Central Committee elected by the Congress did Stalin at last reveal his impatience. Firstly he asked to resign as Central Committee Secretary. Malenkov was chairing the session and turned white with dread lest the Central Committee members failed spontaneously to rise to their feet to deny Stalin his request. Luckily for him, they did.²⁶

Then Stalin gave an impromptu address. Still speaking of his weariness, he gave the impression that he knew this might be the last speech he made. In particular, he rambled through his memories of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918: ‘And what about Lenin? Just you read again what he said and what he wrote at that time. He let out a roar at that time, in so incredibly grievous a situation; he thundered, he was scared of no one. Thundered, he did.’ In almost the same breath Stalin considered his own career. While almost begging the Central Committee to compare him favourably with Lenin, he also wanted to appear as the party’s modest and dutiful leader. ‘Once this task has been entrusted to me,’ he declared, ‘I carry it through. But not in such a way that it’s accredited only to me. I’ve not been brought up that way.’²⁷

This was a man anticipating his obituary. Stalin, too, wanted to be remembered as a leader of courage and foresight, a leader who thundered. These were not the characteristics which immediately sprang to mind among those who knew him at close quarters: he had not been notably brave, foresightful or devoid in vanity.

Weary or not, Stalin continued to pose a deadly threat to his colleagues. Halfway through his Central Committee address he suddenly accused Molotov and Mikoyan of political cowardice.²⁸ They rejected his criticisms as tactfully as they could in the circumstances, and the topic was dropped. Nevertheless Central Committee members had been shocked by the episode. Many of them concluded that Stalin wanted at the very least to prevent these two veteran leaders from succeeding him. This impression was strengthened by other moves he made at the Central Committee plenum. For example, he redesignated the Politburo as a Presidium and increased the number of its members to twenty-five. The sinister aspect of the change was that Stalin simultaneously secured the appointment of a seven-person Bureau of the Presidium which, by involving mainly the younger leaders, would allow him to drop the veterans at a convenient moment in the future.

Several central politicians already had reason to expect to be arrested before he collapsed in his dacha at Kuntsevo on 1 March 1953. The sudden, secret nature of his indisposition gave rise to rumours that someone, perhaps Beria, had ordered some skulduggery. Certainly Beria and fellow Politburo members took an unconscionably long time to make a serious attempt to resuscitate Stalin over the next few days.²⁹ The kindest interpretation is that they were too afraid to intervene in decisions on his medical care. Finding him on the floor of his bedroom, they dithered as to what to do with his body; and after doctors pronounced him definitely dead on 5 March, there was much weeping over his passing. Their Boss had entranced as well as horrified them.

Their grief was shared in homes and on the streets after the radio announcement was made on 6 March. Stalin’s funeral took place on Red Square three days later. Foreign statesmen attended as Molotov, Malenkov and Beria pronounced eulogies to the deceased dictator. Molotov, despite having a wife held in prison on Stalin’s orders, was visibly distraught. Malenkov was better composed. But Beria in private dropped all pretence of respect for Stalin and cursed his memory. After the speeches, Stalin’s corpse, embalmed by experts from the same institute as had developed the technique for Lenin, was displayed in what was renamed as the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum. A silence was meant to descend over Moscow. But such was the crowd in the nearby streets that a commotion broke out. The pressure of bodies led to dozens of fatalities. From under the glass the chemically-treated corpse could still terminate innocent lives.

And so Stalin’s accomplices came into a disturbing inheritance. It is true that the Soviet Union was still a superpower. It dominated Eastern Europe. It had the world’s second largest industrial capacity; its population was literate and acquiescent. The armed forces, the security organs, the party and the ministries of government were calmly able to confront their duties. If Soviet leaders were going to face trouble in 1953, it would arise only because they had grossly mishandled opinion among the élites or fallen out irretrievably among themselves — and the leaders could at least take consolation from the fact that Stalin’s death had pre-empted the immediate possibility of a massive purge that would lead to the deaths of leaders, their cliental groups and perhaps millions of other people.

Yet enormous problems had been bequeathed by him, and not the least of them was agricultural. Malenkov had asserted at the Nineteenth Party Congress that wheat production had recovered to the level of 1940 and that the country’s grain problem had been solved ‘definitively and forever’. This was nonsense. The statistics were a wild exaggeration of reality since they were based upon what was known as the ‘biological yield’. This was a calculation derived from observations of the crop before it was harvested. Subsequent loss of grain in fact often occurred through bad weather; and it always took place because the harvest was stored so badly. Furthermore, whole regions of Russia had fallen out of cultivation. The kolkhozniki were under-paid and over-taxed, and the demographic structure of countless villages was distorted by the exodus of most able-bodied men and the young of both sexes. The neglect of rural problems could not be allowed to persist.

Even the forced-labour system presented difficulty. Discontent was on the rise in the prisons, camps, colonies and ‘special settlements’ where 5.5 million prisoners were still held.³⁰ A rebellion in Kolyma in 1949 was followed by another near Krasnoyarsk in 1951 and yet others in Labytnangi and Ozerlag in 1952.³¹ Permanent quiescence in the Gulag could no longer be taken for granted.

At the same time it was questionable whether the ‘free’ industrial sector could continue as previously. Workers were too afraid to go on strike, but resented their conditions of labour, their low wages and poor diet and housing. There was little that administrators could do to make them more conscientious; and the administrators themselves were constrained by patterns of organization inimical to honesty and independent thought. Wasteful methods of production persisted in factories, mines and other enterprises. Stalin, furthermore, had rejected advice to invest substantially in chemical industries or in natural gas. His projections had become extremely inflexible. Capital goods in general and armaments in particular were given reinforced priority: expenditure on the armed forces, their weaponry and equipment, was forty-five per cent more in 1952 than two years earlier. This was a great strain upon the Soviet budget and was not indefinitely sustainable.

National problems, too, had accumulated. Acute, lasting embitterment had been caused by Stalin’s deportations of nationalities during and after the Second World War; and the elevation of the prestige of the Russians above the other peoples of the USSR also caused lasting offence. Science and culture, too, were subjected to excessive supervision. Not only writers and scientists but also teachers, engineers, lawyers and managers worked in fear. Initiative from below was thwarted. The disgruntlement among administrative, professional and intellectual groups was intensifying. They especially wanted to work without fear of imprisonment. Only terror at the punitive repercussions held them back from complaining publicly.

All in all, Stalin’s system of rule was not at its most effective when dealing with an increasingly complex society. The government, the party, the army and the security police — at metropolitan as well as local levels — were run on principles of the most rigid hierarchy. The scope for constructive consultation and collaboration had been severely reduced. The Soviet state as a whole was vastly over-centralized. Policies were decided by a tiny group of leaders, and the danger that they might blunder was acute. The leadership itself was subject to permanent intimidation; none of its members could fail to be mindful of the power of the security organs. For years the various Politburo members had taken objection to official policies but never dared to express themselves openly. Stalin had scared them rigid. In short, there was too much fear and too little trust for such a system to endure indefinitely.

The world outside was also dangerous. East European nations resented their subjugation to the Soviet Union. The USA and its allies in NATO had no intention of rescuing them from this position; but resistance to further communist expansion was a firm objective. The Korean War was a suppurating sore in relations between the USSR and the USA.

These were among the problems left behind by Stalin. They existed in every area of public life: politics, economy, ethnic relations, culture, security and continental and global power. And they complicated and aggravated each other. It is true that the Soviet order was not on the verge of collapse. But if several of these problems were not tackled within the next few years, a fundamental crisis would occur. Stalin’s legatees were justified in feeling nervous, and knew that the next few months would be a period of great trial for them. The uncontainable surge of crowds on to the streets of Red Square as he was laid to rest alongside Lenin in the joint Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum had been a warning to his successors about the passions lurking under society’s calm surface. This was the first act of self-assertion by the people since the inception of Stalin’s dictatorship. It was by no means clear how the Kremlin leaders would respond to the challenge.

17 ‘De-Stalinization’ (1953–1961)

The people, however, had only a brief walk-on role in the drama. The major parts were jealously grabbed by Stalin’s veteran associates, who wanted to consolidate their positions of power as individuals and to preserve the compound of the Soviet order. Their common goals were to maintain the one-party, one-ideology state, to expand its economy, to control all public institutions and their personnel, to mobilize the rest of society, to secure the Soviet Union’s domination of Eastern Europe and to expand communist influence around the world. And several of these veterans were convinced that such goals were unattainable unless a reform programme were quickly to be implemented.

There was dispute about this, but at first it did not matter because all the veteran leaders had a transcendent interest in securing their power at the expense of the younger rivals whom Stalin had promoted to high office. The veterans agreed tactics before convoking a combined meeting of the Council of Ministers, the USSR Supreme Soviet and the Party Central Committee on 6 March 1953. They had already decided among themselves on the size and composition of the various leading political bodies. In particular, they arranged a decrease in the number of members of the Presidium of the Central Committee from twenty-five to ten. The purpose of this was to remove the younger leaders from the Presidium and reduce their authority. Among the older figures who asserted themselves were the three leaders — Molotov, Mikoyan and Beria — who had appeared likely to be arrested before Stalin’s death.

Malenkov benefited most from the new division of posts. He was appointed as both Chairman of the Council of Ministers and Party Central Committee Secretary. His Deputy Chairmen in the Council of Ministers were to be Beria and Molotov. Beria was to lead the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), and this institution was merged with the Ministry of State Security (MGB) into an enlarged MVD. Molotov was promoted to Minister of Foreign Affairs and Khrushchëv kept his post as Party Central Committee Secretary. They were ruthless, ambitious men, but at the time there seemed little to stop Malenkov from becoming the dominant leader in succession to Stalin.

While outward loyalty was shown to Stalin’s memory, his policies were already undergoing reconsideration. Malenkov wanted quieter relations with the West; he also favoured the boosting of industrial consumer-goods production and the intensification of agricultural techniques. Beria agreed with this and went further by demanding that concessions be made to the non-Russians in terms of political appointments in the USSR and that a lighter grip should be maintained in Eastern Europe (and secretly he resumed contact with Tito in Yugoslavia). Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchëv backed a curtailment of the security police’s arbitrariness. Khrushchëv’s particular priority was agriculture, and he urged the ploughing up of virgin lands in Kazakhstan as a cheap way to raise output rapidly. Only a couple of Presidium members, Molotov and Kaganovich, opposed reform. The dynamism in the central political leadership belonged to Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchëv.¹

Beria organized an exhibition for Central Committee members where tapes of Stalin’s conversations with the security police were played. Stalin’s guilt in arresting innocent officials was established.² The general public had no access to the exhibition; but when the MVD announced that the accused professors in the Doctors’ Plot had been freed, it was evident that the Soviet supreme leadership wished to attenuate its reliance on terror. Articles appeared in Pravda proclaiming that the masses rather than single leaders made history. Marxism-Leninism was stated to be hostile to any ‘cult of the individual’ and to favour ‘collective leadership’. The barely disguised object of such commentary was Stalin.

Simultaneously the main reformers were locked in struggle about the rest of their reforms. On 14 March, Malenkov was compelled to choose between his respective posts in party and government. He stepped down as Central Committee Secretary, calculating that his job as Chairman of the Council of Ministers held the greater political authority. This handed the Central Committee Secretariat into the keeping of Khrushchëv, who thereby acquired an incentive to strengthen the party’s authority. At the time, however, the thoughts of most leaders were preoccupied not with Khrushchëv but with Beria, who embodied a double threat to all of them. First, his radical plans for reform endangered the interests of influential institutions and could even have destabilized the entire Soviet order; second, his position in the MVD gave him the capacity to deal violently with any political rivals. Beria was a complex politician. But most of his colleagues did not ponder his complexities: they simply feared him.

The reforming projects of Beria came thick and fast. He also obtained republican-level appointments in both the MVD and the communist party for his nominees; and when he introduced MVD troops to Moscow to deal with a mass outbreak of larceny (caused by his release of thousands of petty criminals from the Gulag camps!), Khrushchëv and others guessed that Beria was about to use the troops to carry out a coup d’état. They were not willing to wait to see whether their speculation was correct: Beria’s past career marked him out as a danger to everyone.

Khrushchëv has left us his account of what happened next. Not unexpectedly, he appears as the hero of the drama. Apparently Khrushchëv first cajoled Malenkov into joining a plot against Beria, and Voroshilov wept with relief when told of their plans. Mikoyan had his doubts but went along with the rest of the Party Presidium. On 26 June the Presidium met in the Kremlin. Khrushchëv had arranged for Marshals Zhukov and Moskalenko to hide outside the door until an agreed signal for them to burst in and grab Beria. If Beria had a fault as a potential single leader, it was over-confidence. He was taken by surprise, bundled into the back of a car and held in military custody. Army commanders enthusiastically took possession of their past tormentor-in-chief. Party officials, too, were delighted at the news. Both central and local politicians felt relief that an incubus had been removed from Soviet politics.

A Central Committee plenum was held on 2 July, where Beria’s actions as head of the security police were denounced. Khrushchëv’s proposal for the MVD to be placed directly under the party’s control was given warm sanction. Party officials could no longer be arrested except with permission of the party committee to which they belonged. Beria himself was accused of having been an anti-Bolshevik agent in the Civil War (which may have been true) and a British agent after the Second World War (which was nonsense). From prison he mewled to Malenkov that Khrushchëv had tricked the Presidium.³ But he also acknowledged his many abuses of political power and admitted to having raped young girls. Once arrested, Beria was never very likely to emerge alive. In December 1953 he was convicted in camera and shot.

The process was rich in ironies. For the movement away from Stalin’s legacy had been engineered by typically Stalinist tactics: Beria’s judicial sentence was imposed in advance by politicians and the allegation that he was a British spy was a Stalin-style fatuity. Nevertheless the times were a-changing. The first drastic adjustment of institutional relationships since the 1930s took place as the communist party fully subordinated the state’s policing agencies to itself. A few months later, in March 1954, the gigantic Ministry of Internal Affairs was broken up into two institutions. One was still to be called the MVD and was to deal with problems of ordinary criminality and civil disorder; the other would be the Committee of State Security (KGB): as its name suggested, it was charged with the protection of the USSR’s internal and external security. No doubt the Presidium calculated that any resultant rivalry between the MVD and the KGB would render the police agencies easier to control.

Such changes were the product of decisions taken at the apex of the Soviet political system: the party leaders wanted no interference in their claim to govern. Most citizens followed developments warily. There were no illicit posters, no strikes, no demonstrations. Fear of retribution remained pervasive. Only in the camps, where the inmates had nothing left to lose, was a challenge thrown down to the authorities. In Norilsk and Vorkuta there were uprisings which were suppressed only by the introduction of armed troops who mowed down the defenceless rebels with tanks and machine guns.⁴ Yet the uprisings had some effect inasmuch as discipline in the camps was relaxed somewhat. Mention of these events was forbidden in the mass media; but politicians had been given a lesson that repression alone was not enough to keep regular control even over prisoners. All the more reason for changing policy before popular discontent got out of hand.

The reformers kept their advantage in the Presidium. After Stalin’s death a leavening of the cultural and social atmosphere was allowed to occur. Permission was given for the appearance of an article by Vladimir Pomerantsev calling for greater sincerity in literature. The deceits and self-deceits in literature and the mass media were widely denounced, and a sensation was caused by Ilya Erenburg’s short novel The Thaw, which described the problems of administrators and intellectuals in the Stalin period.

But the conflict intensified between Malenkov and Khrushchëv over the nature of the reforms to be adopted. Already in April 1953, Malenkov had lowered retail prices for both food and industrial consumer products; and in August he presented a budget to the Supreme Soviet cutting taxes on agriculture and raising the prices paid to the collective farms for their output. By October he was arguing that the consumer-oriented sector of industry should expand faster than armaments and capital goods. But Khrushchëv countered with his own projects. At the September Central Committee plenum he successfully proposed the cultivation of the virgin lands. Nor did he do himself any harm by giving the impression that no one else was quite as keen as he to end rule by police terror. The plenum rewarded him for his initiative in the Beria affair by designating him as First Secretary of the Central Committee.

His elevation came from his daring; but this would have counted for little unless his policies had been attractive to influential political constituencies. Unlike Malenkov, he did not advocate peaceful coexistence with world capitalism. Nor did he propose to alter the existing investment priorities; and, in contrast with Malenkov, he proudly described the central and local party apparatus as ‘our underpinning’.⁵ Deftly he gained more friends than Malenkov in the heavy-industrial ministries, the armed forces and the communist party. Furthermore, he had shown a large capacity for shouldering responsibility. He obviously had a talent for setting himself clear practical objectives in a situation of extraordinary flux.

The dangers were not restricted to internal Kremlin disputes. The tensions between the USSR and the USA remained acute, and the Korean War had not ended. In 1952 American scientists had attained a further stage of destructive military capacity by producing a hydrogen bomb. Their Soviet counterparts fortified their competing research programme. In the meantime Stalin had made moves to effect a settlement in Korea lest the conflict might erupt into a Third World War. His successors maintained this approach. The Korean War was brought to a close and Korea was divided between a communist North and a capitalist South. But the Cold War between the Soviet and American governments continued. In March 1954 the USA successfully tested a hydrogen bomb that could be delivered by long-range aircraft. But the USSR was catching up. Already in August 1953 Soviet scientists had tested its own hydrogen bomb and they were conducting research on long-range aircraft capable of delivering it.⁶

The Soviet regime had sharp difficulties not only with the USA but also with several countries in Eastern Europe. The industrial workers in Berlin, sensing that Stalin’s death gave them an opportunity to express their discontent with the political and economic policies of the German Democratic Republic, went on strike in midsummer 1953. There were riots, too, in Plzeň in Czechoslovakia; and rumblings of discontent were reported in Poland and Hungary. The Soviet Party Presidium members made material concessions while ruthlessly suppressing overt opposition; but all of them recognized the dangers of the international situation: they were confronted by instabilities and threats which needed handling with decisiveness.

Khrushchëv had this quality aplenty; but his eventual victory in the dogfight in the Kremlin was not yet guaranteed: he had to continue making his own luck. Among his manoeuvres was the establishment of a commission under P. N. Pospelov to investigate the crimes of the 1930s and 1940s. The Leningrad purge of 1948–9 came under particular scrutiny. This was not the greatest case of blood-letting in Stalin’s time, but for Khrushchëv it had the advantage that Malenkov had been involved as a perpetrator of repression. Malenkov was a politician on the slide. The harvest of summer 1954 was a good one, and the success was attributed to Khrushchëv even though the virgin lands contributed next to nothing to the improvement. By December, Malenkov’s authority in the Presidium had been so weakened that he was compelled to resign as Chairman of the Council of Ministers.

Although the Presidium steadily came under Khrushchëv’s personal influence, he still had to show restraint. Malenkov’s post in the Council of Ministers was given in February 1955 to Nikolai Bulganin, who had allied himself with Khrushchëv but was not his protégé. Furthermore, the Ministry of Defence — which until then had been led by Bulganin — was handed over to Marshal Zhukov, who had never been known to kowtow to civilian politicians. But Khrushchëv was in irrepressible mood. Together with Bulganin he visited Yugoslavia despite having executed Beria for having written letters to Tito. Khrushchëv’s pre-eminence was on display in Belgrade: his boisterous vulgarity left no room for ambiguity for observers. Nor did he fail to stress that, as Stalin’s successor, he would frame his policies to compete with the USA. In May 1955 the Soviet government convoked a meeting of East European communist leaders and formed the Warsaw Pact in reaction to the permission given by NATO for West Germany to undertake its rearmament.

Khrushchëv had to watch his back. Gradually Malenkov shifted back into an alliance with Molotov and Kaganovich: having lost the struggle to be the supreme reformer, he settled for becoming an associate of communist reactionaries. There was much uneasiness about Khrushchëv. His enemies understood, above all else, that the Soviet edifice as reconstructed by Stalin was held together by tightly-interlocked structures and that any improvised architectural alterations might bring the roof down on everyone’s head.

But how to stop Khrushchëv’s mischief ? In foreign policy Molotov as yet had little objection to Khrushchëv, who had helped him to repudiate Malenkov’s contention that any nuclear war would bring about ‘the destruction of world civilization’. Khrushchëv’s weakness in 1955 lay instead in domestic economic policy. In pursuit of his virgin lands scheme Khrushchëv had replaced the Kazakhstan communist party leadership in Alma-Ata, and sent his follower Leonid Brezhnev there to secure policy on his behalf. He recruited 300,000 ‘volunteers’, especially from among students, for summer work in Kazakhstan and western Siberia. As a consequence Khrushchëv’s survival in power depended on the germination of wheat seed in the ploughed-up steppe of central Asia. Fortunately for him, the 1955 grain harvest across the USSR was twenty-one per cent higher than in the previous year.⁷

What is more, Khrushchëv had kept his ability to surprise. On 13 February 1956, a day before the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he proposed to the Presidium that a speech should be delivered on ‘the Cult of the Individual and its Consequences’. This constituted a call for discussion of the horrors of the Stalin period. Khrushchëv argued not from moral but from pragmatic premisses: ‘If we don’t tell the truth at the Congress, we’ll be forced to tell the truth some time in the future. And then we shan’t be the speech-makers; no, then we’ll be the people under investigation.’⁸ Molotov’s counter-proposal was for the speech to be made on the theme ‘Stalin the Continuer of Lenin’s Work’. But Khrushchëv had a majority, and arrangements were made for his speech to be given at a closed session of the Congress.⁹

This decision was not mentioned by Khrushchëv in his general report at the start of the Congress on 14 February. It was not Khrushchëv but Mikoyan who stirred things up by making some derogatory remarks about Stalin. But behind the scenes Khrushchëv was preparing himself. The Pospelov commission had made a deposition to the Presidium in late January detailing many of Stalin’s abuses. Khrushchëv wanted to increase trenchancy of the commission’s criticisms and to offer an account of Stalin throughout his rule. With this in mind he recruited D. T. Shepilov, fellow Central Committee Secretary and a former Pravda editor, to head a drafting group.¹⁰ Presidium members eyed the process with trepidation. As Stalin’s adjutants, they knew about the mass repressions: all of them — including Khrushchëv — had blood on their hands. They could only hope that Khrushchëv was right that it was better to raise the Stalin question sooner rather than later.

On 25 February he spoke, as planned, to a closed session of the Congress: only delegates from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were allowed to attend. Journalists were banned. Even distinguished foreign communists such as Togliatti were prohibited from being present. The Presidium exercised the greatest possible control of the occasion.

The speech, which lasted four hours, was a turning-point in the USSR’s politics. Its unifying topic was Stalin. Khrushchëv informed the Congress about Lenin’s call in 1923 for Stalin’s removal from the General Secretaryship. The rest of the speech was given over to the abuses perpetrated by Stalin in the following three decades. The repressions of 1937–8 were itemized. Khrushchëv stressed that Stalin was a blunderer as well as a killer. The failure to anticipate Hitler’s invasion in mid-1941 was given as a particularly gross example. Wanting to demonstrate the persistence of Stalin’s terrorism, Khrushchëv described the ethnic deportations of the Second World War and the post-war carnage in the Leningrad Affair, the Doctors’ Plot and the Mingrelian Affair. Stalin had brought about a drastic decline in internal party democracy. Thirteen years elapsed between the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Party Congresses. After 1945 the Central Committee rarely met, and the Politburo fell into desuetude.

Khrushchëv had agreed to exculpate the current Presidium. Allegedly Stalin had decided everything. Only fitfully did Khrushchëv yield to the temptation to score points off fellow Presidium members. For instance, he mentioned the difficulties in Ukraine in the Second World War when an appeal was made to Stalin for increased supplies of equipment. Malenkov had given the following answer on Stalin’s behalf: ‘You have to arm yourselves.’ The revelation of so curt a response, even if Malenkov had merely been relaying a message, reflected badly upon him. Khrushchëv was casting a shadow over the reputation of his most powerful rival.

Otherwise he heaped the blame on Stalin and the conveniently dead leaders of the security police. On the Great Terror he declared to the Congress: ‘The majority of Politburo members did not, at the time, know all the circumstances in these matters and therefore could not intervene.’ He suggested that only a handful of associates helped Stalin in his dastardly activity: the security-police leaders Yezhov, Beria, Abakumov (and subordinates of theirs such as the ‘bird-brained’ Rodos).¹¹ Supposedly the repressions could not have been stopped by well-meaning communist party leaders because they lacked the necessary information about the purges undertaken by Stalin and his police cronies. Khrushchëv, who had helped to organize the terror in Moscow and Ukraine in 1937–8,¹² was lying shamelessly; but this is what he knew he needed to do if he was to retain his reputation and ruin Stalin’s.

For the supreme intention was to knock Stalin from the pedestal of public esteem. Stalin was portrayed as a capricious autocrat. As an example of Stalin’s megalomania he recalled the comment: ‘I’ll wag my little finger, and Tito will be no more!’ Stalin, moreover, had been extremely distrustful. ‘Why,’ he would enquire of his associates, ‘are your eyes so shifty today?’

Khrushchëv’s analysis was focused more upon personality than upon policy. He stipulated that the bloodshed had started only after the assassination of Kirov in 1934. Indeed Khrushchëv proposed that, before the mid-1930s, Stalin had performed ‘great services to the party, to the working class and the international labour movement’. Thus the horrors committed in the Civil War, the NEP and the First Five-Year Plan were ignored. Agricultural collectivization, despite all the deaths and deportations, was condoned. In addition, the burden of Khrushchëv’s message was that mostly it was prominent officials who had been Stalin’s victims. There had been, he suggested, ‘several thousand’ functionaries of party, government and army; he gave no hint that millions of people, many of whom did not hold any rank at all in public life, had died.

His undeclared purpose was to show the Congress that the attack on Stalin would not involve a dismantlement of his entire system. Arbitrary arrests and executions would cease; but the communist one-party state would be preserved, alternative ideologies would be suppressed and state economic ownership would remain intact. In Khrushchëv’s presentation, this would involve a reversion to the days of Lenin, when supposedly all the working people of the USSR had luxuriated in the beneficent farsightedness of Marxism-Leninism. The future for the USSR lay in a return to the past.

By reassuring, flattering and inspiring the Congress, Khrushchëv won support from its delegates even though many of them were so shocked by the contents of the closed-session speech that they fainted. Molotov could frighten them, Malenkov confuse and sedate them. Only Khrushchëv had had the animal boldness to exhilarate them; and, having pulled off this achievement, he turned his attention to the rest of the country. Confidential briefings of party members were given to activists in local party organizations. Khrushchëv gave transcripts to foreign communist party leaders as they departed home. As if suspecting that several of the recipients might censor its contents, he also arranged for the KGB to ensure that the CIA should obtain a copy, and the London Observer scooped the world by printing a full version.

In the West his policies were dubbed de-Stalinization. This was understandable since Khrushchëv had devoted an entire report to denouncing Stalin. But Khrushchëv himself talked instead of a campaign to eliminate ‘the cult of the individual’.¹³ This was not an inappropriate term even though it was so euphemistic. For Khrushchëv kept Stalin’s kolkhozes in agriculture and his capital-goods priority in industry; he also refrained from rehabilitating Trotski, Bukharin and the various other communists alleged to have been foreign spies. Much remained in place that would have been congenial to Stalin.

Despite the limited nature of the closed-session speech, however, Khrushchëv was already experiencing difficulty in Moscow, where the Presidium baulked at his efforts to publicize the report. Only a brief summary was published in the press. Even this caused a furore. Many citizens were astounded by what was revealed about the 1930s and 1940s. It was not news to them that abuses of power had occurred: practically every household in the land had at least one relative who had fallen victim to the Gulag. But not everyone, especially amidst the generations born and educated under Stalin, had known that Stalin was the instigator of the horrors recounted by Khrushchëv. In Georgia he was venerated as a national hero although he had executed many Georgians. A riot took place in Tbilisi. Yet by and large, the revelations evoked an enormous sense of relief, and the decrease in overt political intimidation was enjoyed even by Stalin’s admirers.

Nevertheless Khrushchëv and his historians, crafty as they had been in formulating the case against Stalin, had not been quite crafty enough. They had done an efficient job solely in relation to the pre-war USSR. Since Lenin had founded the Soviet state, a ‘return to Lenin’ was an attractive path to recommend to comrades at home. But this could not be the case for the other countries of Eastern Europe or indeed for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. They had been conquered not in the Civil War but in Stalin’s military campaigns of 1944–5 — and now Khrushchëv, the Soviet communist leader, was claiming that Stalin was a mass murderer. The closed-session speech gusted away the rags of legitimacy claimed by communism in the countries of the Warsaw Pact.

First to express discontent were Polish industrial workers. As the rumours spread in Poland about Khrushchëv’s closed-session speech, they went on strike. Poles had always known that Stalin had been a wrong ’un, but Khrushchëv’s confirmation of this gave them irrefutable grounds for revolt. Compromises were swiftly agreed. Władisław Gomułka, the veteran communist imprisoned by Stalin in 1948 for showing too much care for Polish national interests, was released and, with much grumpiness, Khrushchëv assented to his becoming First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party.¹⁴ This manoeuvre was combined with police action in Warsaw. The strikes faded and order was restored. But the episode was yet another indication of the unpopularity of the Soviet Army, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the KGB throughout Eastern Europe. No Presidium member took seriously the official Soviet trumpetings about the fraternal feelings felt by the peoples of the Warsaw Pact towards the USSR.

Gomułka’s transfer to supreme power was the most spectacular example of the trend towards compromise. The Kremlin already in Beria’s time had slackened the pace of ‘Sovietization’ in Eastern Europe. Changes of personnel had been undertaken so as to hasten the acceptance of reforms. In particular, campaigns for agricultural collectivization had been halted. Recalcitrant Stalinists had been reprimanded in mid-1953, and told to adopt the Kremlin’s new course of policies.

But things went badly for the USSR. Rákosi was replaced as governmental premier by Imre Nagy but remained leader of the Hungarian party. Only after Khrushchëv’s speech to the Twentieth Congress in Moscow was Rákosi at last constrained to step down entirely. By then Budapest’s workers and intellectuals were pressing for the regime’s fundamental reform.¹⁵ Nagy’s Hungarian patriotism proved stronger than his Marxism-Leninism and he went along with the crowds, trusting that Moscow would not resort to forcible intervention. He also assumed that the West would lean on the Soviet Union to respect Hungary’s sovereignty. On 23 October a popular disturbance took place in Budapest. In the following week a revolt against Soviet domination occurred; and the courageous but naïve Nagy, a communist who had fallen foul of Rákosi in the late 1940s, continued to believe that a political compromise could be reached with Moscow. Visits by Mikoyan, Malenkov and Yuri Andropov, the Soviet ambassador to Budapest, failed to induce a more realistic judgement.

On 4 November 1956 the tanks of the Soviet Army moved against the rebels. Resistance was fierce but futile. The Hungarian revolt was castigated by Khrushchëv as a counter-revolution inspired by the West, and Nagy fled to the safety of the Yugoslav embassy; but he was tricked into leaving it and taken into custody — he was executed in 1958 for refusing to repent of his actions. The NATO countries refused to intervene on Hungary’s side. The joint attack by British, French and Israeli forces on the Suez Canal preoccupied the West at the time; but in any case the major powers flinched from risking the outbreak of a Third World War. A tame Hungarian regime was set up in Budapest under János Kádár, and the countries of the Warsaw Pact were put on notice that, under Khrushchëvas under Stalin, no challenge to the Kremlin’s dominance would be tolerated.

The prestige of Khrushchëv, who had been hailed around the world as the hero of the Twentieth Party Congress, tumbled; but this did not bother him as much as the criticism he suffered in the Presidium. Already in June he had been compelled to agree to an official resolution playing down the abuses of power by Stalin. The Polish strikes and the Hungarian revolt gave further stimulus to his critics. Printed copies of the closed-session report were destroyed before they could be distributed. Legal publication in the USSR did not occur until the rule of Gorbachëv, and for this reason the report became known as ‘the secret speech’. Khrushchëv began to avoid overt commitment to reform; such was his discomfiture that at the end of the year he denounced anti-Stalinist novels such as Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone as being anti-Soviet. Khrushchëv had not attained supreme office to preside over the collapse of the post-war order in the USSR and its subject states.

But it was only a matter of time before Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich mounted an assault on him. On 18 June 1957 they struck. At a Presidium meeting lasting three days, Khrushchëv was outnumbered and defeated. Rather than simply sack him, Molotov and his friends had hit on the device of abolishing the post of Party First Secretary.¹⁶ In this way they hoped to win over those leaders alarmed by the renewal of dissension in the Kremlin. For any other contender for the leadership this might have been the end of the matter, but Khrushchëv staunchly insisted that the right to dismiss him lay with the Central Committee. With the assistance of Marshal Zhukov as Minister of Defence, Central Committee members were flown to Moscow to attend an emergency plenum. Some of them banged on the doors of the Presidium as it discussed Khrushchëv’s fate. The Central Committee plenum commenced on 21 June and resulted in a resounding victory for Khrushchëv.

Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich — along with their last-minute ally D. T. Shepilov — were dismissed from the Presidium by the Central Committee. Into the Presidium came Zhukov, Frol Kozlov and other figures who had stood by Khrushchëv in the crisis. Khrushchëv had won because his amalgam of policies continued to appeal to Central Committee members. Also important was the suspicion that his opponents, were they to achieve victory, might revert to terror. After the plenum, Kaganovich had rung up Khrushchëv pleading for mercy. Khrushchëv issued a contemptuous retort: ‘Your words yet again confirm what methods you intended to use for your vile ends… You measure other people by your own standard. But you are making a mistake.’¹⁷ Such self-righteousness would have been more plausible if Khrushchëv had not had Beria shot in 1953. In his favour, however, it deserves stress that his mercy towards the ‘Anti-Party Group’ was an important break with Stalin’s practices. Khrushchëv guaranteed that internal élite disputes should be conducted without manacles and rifles.

Khrushchëv had fun at the losers’ expense chiefly by subjecting them to humiliating demotions. Molotov became ambassador to Mongolia, Malenkov director of a hydro-electric power station in Kazakhstan and Kaganovich director of a Sverdlovsk cement works. Khrushchëv’s ascendancy led to a disgorging of victims of Stalin’s purges from the Gulag penal camps. Until 1956 only some 7000 reprocessed cases had resulted in judicial rehabilitation of prisoners. (Molotov’s wife had been among the first of them.) Within a few months, between eight and nine million people had been rehabilitated.¹⁸ It is true that this good fortune came to most of Stalin’s victims posthumously. Even so, the releases from the camps became a mass phenomenon after the Twentieth Congress, and they deepened popular knowledge about the past.

The policy of ‘socialist legality’ had been proclaimed since 1953. This did not signify that the USSR was meant to become a law-based state: Khrushchëv provided a system under which the constitution and the law would be enforced solely insofar as communist party rule was preserved. The Presidium’s dominance over high state policy remained in place. If Hungary needed invading or a summit with the American president arranging or a new crop imposing on the kolkhozes, this was normally done by the Presidium. Thus the Central Committee was able to intervene in discussions on policy only at the Presidium’s request — and this happened most decisively when the Presidium was itself divided. Yet the Central Committee had had a taste of power; and Mikhail Suslov, when pleading with the Central Committee to vote for Khrushchëv at the June 1957 plenum, took the liberty of noting the need for Khrushchëv to end his sharp-tongued, overbearing behaviour towards colleagues.¹⁹

For a while Khrushchëv seemed to take Suslov’s words to heart. He consulted often with Presidium and Central Committee members and published the proceedings of Central Committee plenums. Power at the centre was exercised more formally than before 1953. Party bodies met regularly and asserted control over the other public institutions. The party inherited by Khrushchëv grew in size as a recruitment campaign gathered strength. When Stalin died, there were nearly 6.1 million members; by 1961 there were 9.7 million.²⁰ Khrushchëv also started to show considerable contempt for the desk-bound bureaucracy of the communist party apparatus. He wanted action in society, and he set an example by visiting factories, mines and kolkhozes. The party had to be mobilized so that the party might mobilize society.

The change in the party’s condition, however, had its limits. The party set policies, but these policies continued to be conditioned by the existing interests of groups, organizations and institutions. Thus the Soviet Army impeded a reconsideration of military priorities. Khrushchëv preferred nuclear weapons to the more traditional armed forces on grounds of cheapness as well as deterrence. Marshal Zhukov argued strongly against Khrushchëv. From Khrushchëv’s standpoint, Zhukov had outlived his usefulness as soon as the Anti-Party Group had been defeated. Khrushchëv moved with dispatch. In October 1957 a startled Zhukov was pitched into retirement. Nevertheless the Soviet Army command remained a serious constraint on the Presidium’s freedom to govern. So, too, were the economic ministries that could in practice choose which of the various priorities set for them by the Presidium they would pursue.

While the Presidium could push its policies upon the ministers as party members, the ministers in their turn had access to the party’s decision-making; and, much as he altered the party’s apparatus, Khrushchëv retained the system of economic departments in the Secretariat.²¹ As ever, the officials in such departments did little to inhibit the inclinations of ‘their’ ministries. The entanglement of party and government was strengthened in March 1958 when Khrushchëv, having waited his chance to get rid of Bulganin who had supported the Anti-Party Group, took over the post of Chairman of the Council of Ministers. The head of the party now also became head of the government.

Having worsted the Anti-Party Group, Khrushchëv at last felt well placed to rectify the inadequacies in consumer-goods production in Soviet factories.²² Malenkov’s priority became his own. This adjustment of policy, however, unsettled the institutional support that had facilitated his rise to power since Stalin’s death; the traditional lobbies in the army and the heavy-industrial civilian administrations were appalled by what they saw as his treachery. Conflict was avoided mainly because Khrushchëv did not push his wishes too hard. In any case he adhered to his original contention that agricultural improvements remained more urgent than changes in industrial investment policy. He expressed his opinion as follows: ‘It is important to have good clothing and good footwear, but it is still more important to have a tasty dinner, breakfast and lunch.’²³ Khrushchëv also vetoed suggestions that Soviet automotive plants should produce cars for purchase by the private citizen.²⁴

Thus his basic economic preferences were much more conventional than appeared from his declarations about the need to satisfy all the aspirations of Soviet consumers. The incidence of such declarations increased in the late 1950s, and his confidence in his own judgement on the entire range of official policies was extreme. Khrushchëv, the Party First Secretary and the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, led from the front.

His colleagues noticed the paradox that the politician who denounced the ‘cult of the individual’ was zealous in accumulating prestige. A day would not pass without his picture appearing in the press. The practice was resumed of prefacing books with mandatory eulogies to the party’s leader. Khrushchëv secured additional publicity for himself by appointing his son-in-law Aleksei Adzhubei as editor of Izvestiya. He had a keen eye for self-advertisement (although the photograph of him wrapped in a bearskin rug probably confirmed the Western image of the threat posed by each Soviet leader!). Significantly, he stopped short of commissioning a full-scale biography: presumably his criticism of Stalin’s vanity-publishing ventures dissuaded him from such an attempt. But this was a rare instance of restraint. Khrushchëv demanded and obtained adulation from the press, radio, cinema and television.

It was this ebullience that had powered his rise from unpropitious social origins. As a lad in the village of Kalinovka in Kursk province, Khrushchëv had worked as a shepherd. In adolescence he had drifted — like many other young Russians — to the Don Basin and signed on as a miner. In the First World War he was active in the labour movement. In the Civil War he fought on the Red side, becoming a Bolshevik in 1918. His exuberant intelligence was coupled to ambition. After rising through the local party network in Ukraine, in 1929 he undertook training at the Industrial Academy in Moscow. Despite his inadequate formal education, he made further headway after taking up the cudgels against Bukharin in the struggle over the First Five-Year Plan. Kaganovich, who already knew him in Ukraine, helped to bring him to the attention of Stalin himself.

By 1935 Khrushchëv was leading the Moscow City Party Committee and three years later he became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine. In the Great Terror he was an unflinching purger, but he was also a dynamic administrator. In 1941 he became the main political commissar on the Southern front. His career was not without its setbacks. Stalin’s moods were hard to anticipate and Khrushchëv had sometimes carried metal-working instruments in his jacket in case he were suddenly to be cast down from office and were to need to seek factory employment.²⁵ Yet Khrushchëv survived, and was honoured with the joint appointment as leader of the party and the government of Ukraine in February 1944. In December 1949, when he was recalled to Moscow as Central Committee Secretary, it had obviously been Stalin’s intention to use him as a political counterweight to Malenkov.

He relished the grandeur of supreme authority from the mid-1950s, and was delighted when his grandson enquired: ‘Grandad, who are you? The tsar?’²⁶ He also liked his vodka and was given to earthy anecdotes and crude outbursts. A more careful First Secretary would not have said to Western politicians: ‘We will bury you!’ Nor would any alternative Soviet leader in 1960 have banged a shoe on his desk at the United Nations to interrupt a speech by the delegate from the Philippines. In power, he had a wonderful time. He adored gadgets, and welcomed scientists to his dacha. Never having been an avid reader, he got distinguished authors to read their works aloud to him. He fancied himself as a thinker with a practical bent. Going to the USA in September, he admired the fertile plains of maize and on his return he instructed all kolkhozes and sovkhozes to grow it. Khrushchëv was ever the enthusiast.

But his impulsiveness irked his colleagues. The maize campaign was a case in point. Leading Soviet agronomists told him that it was a crop unsuited to many regions of the USSR. But he rejected their advice. Khrushchëv, like Stalin before him, always assumed he knew best, and he disrupted the work of any institution which opposed his policies. Even the Party Central Committee’s activities were impaired. Since Khrushchëv was not always able to secure its approval, he introduced outsiders to its proceedings so that they might help to put pressure on its members. In the process he undermined the very patterns of consultation and procedural regularity that he had once helped to establish.

Thus, having used the party apparatus as a means of taking supreme power, he attempted to reduce its capacity to constrain him; and he convinced himself that the party’s problems stemmed from the kind of officials he had inherited from Stalin. In 1961 he brought in a rule confining them to three periods of tenure of office:²⁷ job insecurity for his erstwhile supporters increased. At the same time he was a sucker for flattery. A. M. Larionov, the first party secretary in Ryazan province, inserted himself into Khrushchëv’s affections by claiming an unprecedented expansion in local meat production. Larionov had achieved this only by killing off an inordinate number of livestock and by buying the remainder from outside his area. Found out, Larionov committed suicide in 1960. But Khrushchëv blundered on regardless. A vast turnover of personnel occurred in the late 1950s.

In economics, too, Khrushchëv made his imprint. In 1953 his personal objective had been the exploitation of the virgin lands, and he had implied that no large diversion of finances would be needed to turn agriculture out of its Stalinist rut. It was quite a campaign. Within three years of Stalin’s death an additional 36 million hectares were put under the plough. This was as large as the cultivated area of Canada and represented a staggering extension of Soviet cereal agriculture. Khrushchëv also returned to one of his pet schemes by carrying out the amalgamation of kolkhozes into bigger units. The number of such farms consequently dropped from 125,000 to 36,000.²⁸ Khrushchëv wanted the biggest possible units of agricultural production. He also strove to turn kolkhozes into sovkhozes, thereby increasing the number of peasants employed directly as state employees; and he severely reduced the area under cultivation in private plots.

For Khrushchëv, in his own way, was a communist believer who wished to demonstrate the superiority of communism. While he tried to increase central state intervention in some ways, he also tried to liberate rural initiative. The machine-tractor stations were abolished in 1958. Kolkhozes were to be allowed to run their affairs without excessive local interference. The annual harvest figures, which were the key test of Khrushchëv’s agricultural policy, were generally encouraging. Wheat output rose by over fifty per cent between 1950 and 1960. Milk and meat production had increased by sixty-nine and eighty-seven per cent respectively in the seven years after Stalin’s death.²⁹

Food was consumed in the greatest quantity in the country’s history; but such an improvement was not the end of the matter for Khrushchëv. He wanted adjustments in the economy that would afford an even fuller satisfaction of the needs of ordinary consumers. He felt that the ministries in Moscow prevented any solution. They were detached from everyday questions of production and remained careless of local needs. In 1957 he secured the Presidium’s sanction to break up the central ministries and to allocate their functions to 105 regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy). Khrushchëv’s idea was that this new administrative tier would introduce more dynamic planning and management. In 1958, too, he secured a reconsideration of priorities for industrial investment. Capital goods were still projected to expand production at a faster rate than consumer goods: Khrushchëv did not touch this sacred cow. But he adjusted priorities so as to boost those sectors — especially oil, gas and chemicals — that had been neglected by Stalin.

Soviet economic achievements under Khrushchëv were undeniable. An ambitious Seven-Year Plan came into effect in 1959. Gross national income had grown by fifty-eight per cent by 1965 and industrial output by eighty-four per cent. Even consumer goods went up by sixty per cent. There were spectacular successes for the USSR, especially in 1957 when the first sputnik was sent up to circle the earth; in 1960 Yuri Gagarin followed this with the first manned orbit of the globe. Gagarin had a film star’s good looks, but Khrushchëv was his equal as a showman, habitually holding public receptions for cosmonauts when they returned from subsequent missions.

In agriculture, his over-confidence remained incorrigible. He interfered persistently with crop-rotation patterns. Even more damaging were his further restrictions on the size of the private plots which could be allocated to kolkhozniki. Since two fifths of Soviet vegetables were grown on them it took little expertise to foresee that shop shelves would soon become empty unless his policy was reversed. The same picture was discernible in industry. For instance, he disrupted co-ordination in Moscow and other cities by arbitrarily raising targets for the construction of apartment blocks; and, when he simultaneously downgraded the priority for bricks, he brought chaos to his already outlandish schemes.³⁰ Khrushchëv was brought up in the Stalinist tradition of command and did not alter his habits after denouncing Stalin. Never the most self-questioning of men, he assumed he knew best; his bossiness had been hardened into an essential feature of his mode of rule.

There were disappointments for Khrushchëv even by the standards of his own Seven-Year Plan as introduced in 1959. The virgin lands were so over-ploughed that parts of Kazakhstan were turned into a dust-bowl, and Khrushchëv’s authority was diminished by poor harvests across the USSR: agricultural output in 1963 was only ninety-two per cent of the total achieved in 1958. Consumer products were not coming out of the factories in the quantity and with the quality he desired. The investment in capital goods continued to be skewed heavily towards military needs, still more heavily than the Plan required. Khrushchëv’s attempt to associate himself with youth, science and progress was belied by the survival of economic priorities and practices from the 1930s.

So long as the official aim was to achieve military parity with the USA, it was difficult to alter economic policy to any great extent. Yet Khrushchëv, after his early refusal to support Malenkov’s plea for more relaxed relations with the American government, began to reconsider the situation. By the late 1950s Khrushchëv, too, was advocating ‘peaceful coexistence’. Professional historians dutifully ransacked the archives for evidence that Lenin had strongly believed that global socialism and global capitalism could peacefully coexist. In fact Lenin had mentioned such an idea only glancingly.³¹ In any case Khrushchëv did not unequivocally repudiate the traditional Leninist thesis on the inevitability of world wars until global capitalism had been brought to an end.³² But certainly he preferred to put his practical stress on the need for peace. Repeatedly he argued that competition between the communist East and the capitalist West should be restricted to politics and ideology.

The Soviet-American relationship was at the crux of deliberations in the Presidium. The USSR and the USA were left as the only superpowers. As the old empires crumbled, the Presidium sought to befriend the emergent African and Asian states. The opportunity overlooked by Stalin was grasped by Khrushchëv. Together with Bulganin, he had toured India, Burma and Afghanistan in 1955. Nine years later he went to Egypt and offered President Nasser a subsidy sufficient to build the Aswan Dam. In 1959 the guerrilla movement led by Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba and associated itself with the USSR.

At last the original Bolshevik objective to promote the interests of the colonial peoples was being vigorously pursued. Yet the nations of Eastern Europe felt that the Soviet Union was itself an ‘imperialist’ power. There was also an edginess elsewhere, especially in the West, about Soviet pretensions in central Europe. Admittedly the USSR co-signed the peace treaty in 1955 which involved the Soviet Army’s withdrawal from Austria; and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer went to Moscow in the same year and secured the release of the thousands of German POWs not yet repatriated to West Germany. But the Soviet forces’ suppression of the Hungarian popular revolt revived old fears. Also intimidating was the USSR’s refinement of its H-Bomb after its first successful test in August 1953. The USSR had the personnel, ideology and technology to threaten the heart of the continent, and the USA made clear that it would retaliate with nuclear weaponry if any NATO state were to be attacked.

Khrushchëv tried to relieve the tensions between the USSR and the USA. A conference was held in Geneva in 1955 attended by himself and President Eisenhower. In 1959 Khrushchëv permitted an exhibition of the American way of life in Moscow which included a model kitchen. There, the ebullient First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union participated in a televised impromptu discussion with American Vice-President Richard Nixon on the respective virtues of communism and capitalism, and Khrushchëv enhanced his popularity at home and abroad by his readiness to debate directly with foreign leaders. Khrushchëv, accompanied by his wife and a host of advisers, reciprocated with a visit to the USA in September 1959.

Soviet politicians were gradually ceasing to seem utopian fanatics or mindless automatons. But mutual suspicions were not entirely dispelled. Far from it: a summit meeting of Khrushchëv and Eisenhower that had been planned for mid-1960 was ruined by the shooting down of an American U-2 spy-plane over Soviet airspace. The fact that the American pilot Gary Powers had been captured gave Khrushchëv and his spokesmen an irresistible opportunity to upbraid the Americans for their diplomatic untrustworthiness. Yet he still wanted peaceful coexistence with the West. In the 1960 American elections Nixon was defeated by John Kennedy; and Khrushchëv arranged a summit with him in Vienna in June 1961. This proved to be not the easiest of meetings since Khrushchëv did not hide his condescension towards the younger man. But eventually the two leaders agreed to move towards introducing greater predictability and harmony to relations between their countries.

Khrushchëv no longer faced serious domestic challenge to his foreign policy. His control was such, he boasted, that he could instruct Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to take down his trousers and sit on a block of ice and Gromyko would meekly comply. He also knew that Soviet nuclear capacity was as yet nowhere near to parity with the Americans’ despite the claims made by Kennedy in his electoral campaign; he could therefore count on considerable support in the Presidium for a cautious handling of affairs with the USA.³³

Yet the Soviet rapprochement with the USA caused upset in the ‘world communist movement’, especially in the People’s Republic of China. Tensions had existed for years. Mao had never forgotten his demeaning treatment at Stalin’s hands. A Soviet-Chinese agreement was signed in 1959 which promised Soviet technical and financial aid in an attempt to buy off Chinese criticism. But it did not work. In 1960 Mao fulminated against those who based their policies on the priority to avoid nuclear war. Such a war, according to Mao, would in fact be both survivable and winnable. Once the mushroom clouds of the H-bombs had lifted, ‘a beautiful system’ would be created in place of capitalist imperialism. As this tacit critique of Khrushchëv continued, other communist parties were appalled by the growing breach in the international communist movement; and, although the militarist recklessness of Mao was widely rejected, there remained several foreign leaders who had waited for years to oppose Khrushchëv for his insults to Stalin’s memory. The conference of eighty-one parties held in Moscow in 1961 did little to rally Marxist-Leninist global unity.

And so Khrushchëv, despite his dominance, was beset by problems by the early 1960s. His political and economic changes were not as effective as he had anticipated, and his foreign policy was running into obstacles. By removing aspects of Stalin’s heritage and undertaking a semi-return to Leninism, he was solving a few problems but avoiding most. His failure was in some measure his fault. He had an erratic, autocratic personality and a deeply authoritarian outlook. Yet his quarter-reforms of the Soviet order were probably the maximum that his close colleagues and the rest of the central and local élites would have tolerated at the time. The upholders of this order were too powerful, accomplished and confident for any more radical transformation.

18 Hopes Unsettled (1961–1964)

Khrushchëv still believed that history was on the side of communism. His confidence was infectious and attracted a lot of lower-echelon party functionaries and ambitious youngsters to his side. Like Stalin in the 1930s, he persuaded such people that the problems for communism in the USSR could be solved by a more rigorous application of the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism. This, he suggested, would necessarily involve a rejection of Stalin and a reversion to the ideals of Lenin. There were many people who responded to his summons to join the party and to help to change public life. The enthusiasts among them were known as ‘Children of the Twentieth Congress’.

They believed that a reformed Soviet order would quickly demonstrate its political and economic superiority over its Western rivals; they agreed with Khrushchëv that capitalism was like ‘a dead herring in the moonlight, shining brilliantly as it rotted’.¹ Khrushchëv himself assumed that popular gratitude for his liberating influence would engender co-operation between the central political élite and society. He was proud of the achievements made for the average Soviet citizen. High-rise apartment blocks were put up in all cities. Diet went on improving. Meat consumption rose by fifty-five per cent between 1958 and 1965 alone.² Fridges, televisions and even washing-machines entered popular ownership. The hospital and education services were free and universally available; rents, home heating and cooking fuel were very inexpensive. Labour discipline was relaxed.³ Unemployment was practically unknown. Wages rose after 1953 and kept on rising; in the RSFSR between 1959 and 1962, for instance, they increased by seven per cent.⁴

General financial provision had also been introduced for those who had retired from work. In fact the minimum annual pension was set at thirty roubles and was barely sufficient for subsistence;⁵ but Khrushchëv had made a start in tackling the problem and jobs were anyway available for many elderly citizens as concierges, doorkeepers and hotel cleaners. The retention of cheap urban cafeterias meant that neither pensioners nor the working poor starved.

Recreational clubs flourished. Lev Yashin, the soccer goalkeeper, was one among the many sportsmen adored by the population. Escapist entertainment was heard on Soviet radio. A very popular ditty began with the words:

Let there always be sunshine,

Let there always be sky,

Let there always be mama,

Let there always be me!

Such songs had been allowed even under Stalin; the difference was that they were heard much more frequently. Another novelty was Khrushchëv’s permission for a change in the design of apartment blocks so that a family might have its privacy. The shared kitchens and corridors of Stalin’s kommunalki had prevented this; but now parents could speak to their children without fear of being overheard. Nor was it any longer dangerous to take an interest in foreign countries. Hobbies such as philately and Esperanto became activities that did not lead to arrest by the KGB. One of the most popular film series, Fantomas, was a French sci-fi thriller with Russian subtitles; and the authorities began to allow specially-trusted citizens, usually party members, to travel to the West in tourist groups.

Yet much stayed unchanged. Although Khrushchëv rehabilitated millions he punished only a handful of Stalin’s intimates for the abuses of power he regularly condemned. Apart from Beria and the security-police leaders, apparently, there were no serious transgressors in the entire Soviet state. It would, of course, have been difficult to arraign all those whose activities had led to arrests and deaths under Stalin: the result would have been an anti-Gulag as big as the Gulag — and Khrushchëv would have been a convict. Nevertheless his evasiveness had the effect of maintaining public distrust of politicians.

The media of public communication continued to blare out messages of support for the communist party. News programmes stuck closely to the party line of the day. Alternatives to Soviet Marxism-Leninism were banned: Khrushchëv, while getting rid of some of Stalin’s rigidities, introduced rigidities of his own. Doctrinal orthodoxy remained an unquestionable objective, and the authorities did not give up the habit of lecturing society about everything from nuclear-bomb test negotiations to methods of child-care. Day-to-day dispensation of justice was improved and a proliferation of legal reforms took place.⁶ But arbitrariness remained a basic feature of the management of society. The dense network of informers was maintained in every corner of society: the USSR was still a police state. Those Soviet citizens who travelled abroad exemplify the point. They had to write reports on foreigners they met on their holidays; they were also constrained to leave behind a close member of their family as a surety that they would return to the USSR. The state continued to hold its society in suspicion.

Consequently people did not feel grateful to Khrushchëv for long. Material and social conditions had got better, but life in general remained hard — and the political, economic and cultural order was still extremely authoritarian. Khrushchëv in his frequent, lengthy speeches showed that he underestimated the depth of popular grievances.

In the countryside he failed to grasp that the amalgamation of the kolkhozes into super-kolkhozes produced enormous social distress.⁷ His campaign to build quasi-urban settlements for compulsory inhabitation by all farmworkers nearly finished off a peasantry bludgeoned to its knees by Stalin. No kulaks survived to be dekulakized, and the KGB did not pile trouble-makers into cattle-trucks bound for Siberia and Kazakhstan. But deportations of a kind occurred as villages were bulldozed and large settlements were established to form the centres of the enlarged farms. The avowed intention was that schools, shops and recreational facilities should simultaneously be attached to each super-kolkhoz; and probably Khrushchëv genuinely believed that the amalgamations would bring benefit to the rural population. But, as usual, the regime was better at destruction than creation. The new rural facilities always fell short of Khrushchëv’s promises in number and quality.

If peasants had no love for him, he received little greater affection from urban inhabitants. All towns across the USSR were dreary, ill-appointed places to live. Even Khrushchëv’s record in building apartments was ridiculed. The new flats were referred to as khrushchëby, a pun on his surname and the Russian word for slums. Furthermore, the increase in industrial output was achieved at huge cost to the environment. In Kazakhstan his neglect of the effects of nuclear testing led to the deaths of thousands of people. A repertoire of private satirical commentary circulated. Millions of Gulag inmates returned from the camps with bitter jokes about the Soviet order, but most people did not need to have had this penal experience to mock the authorities. The Presidium and the KGB took preventive action against trouble. On days of official celebration, such as May Day or the October Revolution anniversary, the security police regularly cleared the streets of likely trouble-makers. Individuals waving critical placards or clutching petitions of complaint were swiftly arrested.

The authorities could maintain their one-party, one-ideology state; but they were unable to secure acquiescence in their more mundane demands on a daily basis — and the extent of non-collaboration was worrisomely broad in a society wherein no social, economic or cultural activity was officially considered innocent of political implications.

Non-compliance rather than direct resistance was the norm and many social malaises survived from the 1920s. Turnover of workers at the country’s factories peaked at one fifth of the labour-force per annum, and official invocations to stay at an enterprise for one’s working life were despised.⁸ Financial deals struck to dissuade persons from leaving were the convention. This was illegal, but the economy would have come to a halt if such deals had been eradicated. Enterprises, district councils and local party organizations gave the appearance solely of subservience to the central political authorities. Misinformation remained a pervasive feature of the Soviet order: the trend remained to supply inaccurate data to higher bodies in order to obtain low production targets in the following year. Cliental groups and local nests of officials conspired to impede the Kremlin’s decrees. The frequent sackings of party, governmental and police officials served only to bind their successors together in a campaign to save their new jobs.

These phenomena were well known to Khrushchëv, who fitfully tried to eliminate them. But at best, a sullen acceptance of his policies was replacing the initial enthusiasm he had evoked. The difficulty was that the Soviet order did not and could not welcome autonomous initiative in political, social and economic life: spontaneity of thought and behaviour would threaten the entire structure of the state. How, then, could he inspire people again?

In facing up to this problem, he saw that he had to propound his own positive vision of communism. The closed-session speech of 1956 was a denunciation of Stalin, not a delineation of new and inspiring ideas. Before the Twenty-Second Party Congress in Moscow in October 1961 he began to address the task by rewriting the Party Programme, which had been the communist political credo under Stalin (and indeed under Lenin, since it had been accepted in 1919). A team of theorists, editors and journalists had been assembled under B. N. Ponomarëv to produce a draft. Khrushchëv edited its contents.⁹ He insisted that it should avoid incomprehensible abstraction: ordinary people had to be able to understand its wording and its goals. More dubiously, he overrode his advisers’ objection to the inclusion in the Programme of precise quantitative predictions and ideological schedules that were ludicrously over-ambitious.¹⁰

The proceedings of the Twenty-Second Congress were ructious. A verbal barrage was aimed at Stalin’s record, and this time there was no sparing of those among the deceased dictator’s associates who had belonged to the so-called Anti-Party Group: Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich were reviled for their complicity in mass murder. An Old Bolshevik, D. A. Lazurkina, took the platform to recount a dream she had had the previous night in which Lenin had appeared to her saying how unpleasant it was for him to lie next to Stalin’s corpse.¹¹ This stage-managed sentimentality led to a decision to remove Stalin from the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum and to bury him under a simple plinth and bust outside the Kremlin Wall.

The Party Programme accepted by the Congress described the USSR as an ‘all-people’s state’ which no longer needed to use dictatorial methods.¹² Data were adduced on Soviet achievements in production, consumption and welfare. Massive future attainments were heralded: by the end of the 1960s, according to the Programme’s prediction, the per capita output of the USA would be overtaken; by 1980 the ‘material-technical basis’ of a communist society would have been laid down. Full communism would be in prospect. Khrushchëv asserted that the USSR had already reached a point where the ‘all-out construction’ of such a society could begin.¹³ Thus there would be complete freedom for individuals to develop their talents to the full along with the complete satisfaction of every person’s needs. The Soviet Union would enter an age of unparalleled human happiness.

Khrushchëv’s ideas were jumbled. Under communism as projected by Lenin’s The State and Revolution, the state would wither away and society would become entirely self-administering; and Lenin implied political organizations would cease to exist once the dictatorship of the proletariat came to an end. Khrushchëv by contrast expected that the party would increase in influence as the communist epoch came nearer; he never revealed how and why the party would ever give up being the vanguard of communism. Furthermore, it was difficult to see the logic in his argument that dictatorship had ended if freedom of belief, publication, assembly and organization had yet to be realized.

He was less exercised by theory and logic than by the desire to issue an effective summons to action. He called upon all Soviet citizens to participate in public life. The lower organizational units of the party, the Komsomol and the trade unions were to meet more regularly, and new voluntary associations were to be formed. (Interestingly, there was no reference to the KGB.) The most notable innovation were the so-called druzhinniki, which were groups of citizens acting as a vigilante force for law and order on urban streets. Needless to add, Khrushchëv’s summons was delivered on the strict condition that the authority of himself, the Presidium and the entire Soviet order was respected. Mass participation, he assumed, had to be heavily circumscribed. It was consequently hardly surprising that most citizens felt that the main result of his policy was to encourage the busybodies in each town and city to become still more intrusive than ever.

But Khrushchëv’s optimism was unabated, and the Programme eulogized the achievements of the ‘Soviet people’. The opening section proclaimed the October Revolution as the first breach in the wall of imperialism and stressed that the vast majority of workers, peasants and soldiers had supported the Bolsheviks through the years of the Civil War and the NEP. The Five-Year Plans were depicted as the crucible of unrivalled industrial, cultural and even agricultural progress; and the resilience of the Soviet order was said to have been proven by the USSR’s destruction of Nazism in the Second World War.

This was a forceful blend of patriotic and communist rhetoric. Yet the Programme also stated that mimicry of the USSR’s experience was no longer treated as compulsory. It was even conceded that, while the non-communist countries would have to come to socialism through a revolution of some kind, there was no inevitability about civil war. But there was a limit to Khrushchëv’s ideological tolerance. Yugoslavia’s ‘revisionism’ was condemned. ‘Dogmatism’, too, was castigated: he did not name names here, but his obvious target was the People’s Republic of China. Even more odious, however, was the USA. The Americans were the bastion of imperialist oppression around the globe. Peaceful coexistence would prevent a Third World War taking place; but non-violent competition between the two systems would continue. Capitalism was entering its terminal crisis.

The reasoning behind this prognosis was not explained; and indeed there were incompletenesses and confusions throughout the Programme. This was especially obvious in the treatment of the ‘national question’. While one paragraph referred to ‘the Soviet people’ as a single unit, another noted that a large number of peoples lived in the USSR. By fudging the terminology, Khrushchëv presumably had it in mind to avoid giving offence to national and ethnic groups. The Programme explicitly conceded that class distinctions took a shorter time to erase than national differences. Thus the convergence (sblizhenie) of the country’s nations would not happen in the near future; and Khrushchëv, unlike Stalin, refrained from picking out the Russians for special praise. Unlike Lenin, however, he omitted to hail the ‘fusion’ (sliyanie) of all nations as an ultimate communist objective. Consequently the Programme left it unclear how it would be possible to build a communist society within just a few years.

But Khrushchëv was undeterred by logical considerations of this kind. His aim was to carry his listeners and readers on the wave of his enthusiasm. He aimed to revive the political mood of the 1920s, when Bolsheviks had thought no task to be impossible. The Programme, at his insistence, boldly declared: ‘The party solemnly declares: today’s generation of Soviet people will live under communism!’¹⁴

Khrushchëv had published a charter for Soviet patriotism, party authoritarianism, economic conservatism and mass participation. But he was mortified to find that most people were uninspired by it. Radical anti-Stalinists were worried by its silence about the KGB. Peasants were demoralized by its plan to turn kolkhozes into sovkhozes; and the emphasis on increased industrial productivity alarmed workers. Russians pondered why the Programme no longer gave them a higher status than the other nations of the USSR while the other nations — or at least sections of each of them — bridled at being classified as part of ‘the Soviet people’. Traditional communists were equally agitated: the Programme constituted a serious threat to their prerogatives if implemented in full. For nearly all sections of society, furthermore, Khrushchëv’s ideas would involve an increase in the burden of work. Few people were happy about the prospect.

Khrushchëv’s boastful projections were especially inappropriate in the light of the economic difficulties of 1961–2. Prices paid by the state since 1958 to the collective farms were below the cost of production. This was financial idiocy. Shortages of meat, butter and milk had resulted and the Presidium decided to raise the prices. In order to balance the budget it was also resolved, on 31 May 1962, to increase the prices charged to the urban consumers. It was officially pointed out that these prices had been held at the same level since the First Five-Year Plan;¹⁵ but the economic explanation did not interest most people. Life was hard and was about to get harder. Popular opinion was outraged.

There had been urban disturbances before, notably in Karaganda in 1958 where building workers protested against their dreadful living conditions. In 1962, popular disturbances broke out in Riga, Kiev and Chelyabinsk. The hostile mood existed in most major cities, and on 1 June 1962 an uprising took place in Novocherkassk. Several party and police officials were lynched before order was restored by Soviet Army units. The thousands of demonstrators were fired upon, and twenty-three were killed. Presidium members Mikoyan and Kozlov were dispatched to tell the city’s inhabitants that the Kremlin understood their feelings; but only the military action to put Novocherkassk in quarantine and suppress the ‘terroristic’ activity stopped the trouble spreading to the rest of the Soviet Union. KGB chairman Semichastny confidentially informed the Presidium that the majority of rebels were young male workers. Without such people on his side Khrushchëv could never realize his dream of a consensus between government and the governed.¹⁶

For a time he had success with the intelligentsia. Under Khrushchëv the creative arts flourished as at no time since the 1920s. Novelists, painters, poets and film-makers regarded themselves as Children of the Twentieth Congress. After his closed-session speech of 1956 Khrushchëv was given the benefit of the doubt; for it was appreciated that he had a less oppressive attitude to high culture than his rivals in the Soviet political leadership at the time.

Certain works of art were published that, but for him, would never have seen the light of day. New words were written for the state anthem: at the Melbourne Olympic games in 1956 the previous version had had to be played without being sung, because of its eulogy to Stalin. The young Siberian poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko wrote Babi Yar, which denounced not only the Nazi mass murder of Jews in Ukraine but also the Stalinist terror-regime. Anti-Semitism re-emerged as a topic of debate. Andrei Voznesenski, another young writer, composed his Antiworlds cycle of poems which spoke to the emotions of educated teenagers and said nothing about Marxism-Leninism. Jazz was heard again in restaurants. Painters started to experiment with styles that clashed with the severely representational technique approved by the authorities. Poet-guitarists such as Bulat Okudzhava satirized bureaucratic practices. Yevtushenko and Voznesenski became famous, filling large theatres with audiences for their poetry recitations; they were treated by their fans as were pop stars in the West.

Easily the most explosive event in the arts was touched off by a middle-aged former Gulag inmate. In 1962 Alexander Solzhenitsyn brought out his story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This was a vivid account of twenty-four hours in the life of a construction worker in one of Stalin’s camps. Solzhenitsyn’s emphasis that his story was about a comparatively benign day in Ivan Denisovich Shukhov’s life enhanced the literary effect: readers were left wondering what the other days were like. Solzhenitsyn, a reclusive fellow, instantly acquired international renown.

Yet Ivan Denisovich was the peak of the concessions made to cultural freedom. Khrushchëv continued to approve the ban placed upon writers such as Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak. When Pasternak was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1958 for his Doctor Zhivago, Presidium member Suslov persuaded Khrushchëv to compel the writer to refuse the honour. Thereafter political difficulties with his colleagues made the First Secretary regress towards even sterner censorship. In 1963 he visited a modern art exhibition on the Manège below the Kremlin. Wading among the artists’ stands, Khrushchëv described their paintings as ‘shit’. On another occasion he lost his temper with Andrei Voznesenski and other writers. Khrushchëv ranted: ‘Mr Voznesenski! Off you go! Comrade Shelepin [as KGB chairman] will issue you with a passport!’¹⁷

Subjects such as political science and sociology, moreover, were forbidden. The same was true of national studies; only the ‘ethnographic’ analysis of small, non-industrialized peoples could be undertaken. The machinery of censorship stayed in place. Type-scripts had to be submitted to Glavlit before being published; film rushes and even musical scores had to be similarly vetted. Writers of a politically critical bent had to content themselves with writing only ‘for their desk drawer’.

Yet the contrast with the Stalin period must not be overlooked. Until 1953 it had been dangerous even to write for desk drawers; there really had been a loosening of official ideological constraints under Khrushchëv. The works of poet-troubadour Sergei Yesenin were published again. Novels by the nineteenth-century writer Fëdor Dostoevski were reprinted and historians writing about tsarist Russia were also permitted a somewhat slacker framework of interpretation. Moreover, not all the intellectual critics of Khrushchëv had entirely given up hope in him. Writers such as the historian Roy Medvedev, the physicist Andrei Sakharov and the journal editor Alexander Tvardovski hoped that Khrushchëv might be persuaded to resume a more relaxed posture on the arts and scholarship. Even the novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who quickly took a dim view of Khrushchëv, continued to submit manuscripts for publication.

Hopefulness was more evident in Russia than in the other Soviet republics, where nationalism complicated the situation. In the Baltic region the memory of pre-war independence and of post-war armed resistance was alive. Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians thought little of the industrial advance they made as parts of the Soviet economy. Instead they noticed the influx of Russians and other Slavs to the factories being built in their countries. Latvia was a prime example. By 1959 twenty-seven per cent of the republic’s population was Russian.¹⁸ The Baltic region was virtually being colonized by retired Russian generals and young working-class Russian men and women who refused to learn the local language.

The Kremlin leaders proclaimed that this national intermingling was simply a sign of socialist internationalism at work; but they were being disingenuous. In reality they were pumping Russians into the other republics as a means of holding together the vast multi-national state. Russian people, more than any other nation, were capable of identifying their own aspirations with the interests of the USSR. Khrushchëv, unlike Stalin, did not put Russian officials in charge practically everywhere. But Russians were none the less in key positions of authority and control. Khrushchëv customarily appointed them to posts such as second party secretaryships; and nearly always the KGB chiefs in the non-Russian republics were Russians. He also set up a Bureau for the RSFSR within the Party Central Committee; it had little autonomous authority, but its existence was a quiet signal that Russian interests were never overlooked in the Kremlin. Above all, he punished any cases of anti-Russian discrimination. Thus he conducted a large peaceful purge of the Communist Party of Latvia in 1959–61 on the grounds that functionaries had been promoted there purely because they happened to be Latvians. This was a warning to other republics that crypto-nationalist tendencies would not be tolerated.

Khrushchëv consolidated his approach educationally. Going further than Stalin, he stipulated that parents had the right to exempt their children from native-language classes in the non-Russian Soviet republics. This reform, carried through in 1958–9, fortified the attempt to promote the study of Russian in schools. Among non-Russian nationalists, consequently, the name of Khrushchëv was mud. In Kiev, where he had spent many years, he was detested for restricting the expression of Ukrainian national pride.

Even so, the traffic of policy was not unidirectional. In 1954 he transferred Crimea from the RSFSR to Ukraine on the grounds that the local links of transport and economic co-operation were closer with Kiev than with Moscow;¹⁹ but he also aimed to give honour to Ukraine and to increase its interest in the maintenance of the Soviet order. Crimea, which had been seized by the Russians from the Turks in the eighteenth century, was prominent in the annals of Russian military valour. Furthermore, Khrushchëv expressed regret for the abuses suffered by the deported nationalities in 1943–4, and sanctioned the repatriation of the Balkars, Chechens, Ingushi, Kalmyks and Karachai. It must be added that Khrushchëv’s magnanimity was not comprehensive. Not only the Volga Germans but also the Crimean Tatars and the Meshketian Turks were refused permission to return home from Kazakhstan. Probably he was unwilling to show friendliness to Germans so soon after the war; the Meshketians, moreover, lived near the Turkish border and were presumably regarded as a menace to Soviet security.

The reasons for Khrushchëv’s overtures to Ukrainian popular opinion are not hard to guess. It was already obvious that, if current trends prevailed, the Russians would cease to constitute a majority of the USSR’s society. The Presidium assumed that common linguistic origins, culture and history united the Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians. These three peoples were seventy-six per cent of the population in 1959 and were tacitly regarded as the backbone of the Soviet state.²⁰

Yet the authorities curtailed and controlled the public expression of nationhood; for Ukraine was a hindrance as well as a help to the Soviet supreme leadership. Too much concession to national feeling might encourage separatist aspirations, and Ukraine’s very size — it contained the largest non-independent nation in Europe — would endanger the USSR’s integrity if a national movement got out of hand. Consequently only a limited celebration of the nineteenth-century poet Taras Shevchenko was permitted. The policy was the same elsewhere. The anti-tsarist Muslim rebel Shamil, who had been defamed in Stalin’s last years, became a respectable historical figure again in the north Caucasus — but only up to a certain point: emphasis was still given to the benefits brought to the Muslim peoples after their conquest by the Russian Imperial Army. The Presidium knew that the USSR had many deep, ethnically-based enmities; but these had been put into the freezer by the communist party dictatorship: they were not seen boiling in the pot. And, as the regime’s advocates untiringly pointed out, the incidence of national intermarriages had reached ten per cent and was therefore not insignificant.²¹

Most wedding ceremonies, furthermore, were civil affairs conducted by local government functionaries. Encouragement was given to newly-weds to follow their ceremony with visits to monuments to the dead of the Second World War. Soviet patriotism and secular ceremony were meant to supplant religious practice. For the persistence of belief in God was displeasing to the atheistic state and was also regarded as a potential instrument for covert political opposition.

Khrushchëv mounted a crude assault upon religion. On his instructions Christian churches of all denominations were demolished across the country. Only 7,560 were left standing by the mid-1960s.²² The Russian Orthodox Church, which Stalin had exempted from his earlier excesses after the Second World War, suffered from Khrushchëv’s attacks. Yet not even Khrushchëv could do without the Russian Orthodox Church as a tool of foreign and domestic policy. The State Committee of Religious Affairs interfered in its appointments and organization; and the KGB kept dozens of bishops as informers. The Patriarch Aleksi was compelled to travel the world on behalf of the Soviet campaign for ‘peaceful coexistence’. Furthermore, the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church remained corrupted by its continued occupation of cathedrals previously owned by other denominations. This ecclesiastical imperialism was flagrant in Ukraine where both the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church were kept locked out of their own buildings.

Not only in the Baltic region but also in Moldavia, Georgia and Armenia the official authorities reinforced persecution and suborned, demoralized and exploited the priesthood as in Russia. But not all the religious groups succumbed. Certain of them gathered adherents precisely because they were unwilling to collaborate with the regime. The Catholic Church in Latvia and Lithuania was indomitable, and in Russia the Baptists gained in popularity.

Khrushchëv was also ruthless towards non-Christian believers. He allowed only 12,000 mosques and 60 synagogues to survive, and the Buddhists in Siberia were harassed. The anti-religious campaign of the regime involved a further undermining of social morale and cohesion, especially in rural areas. Khrushchëv was not the sole threat to religion: urbanization in the USSR strengthened secularist tendencies in Soviet society just as it did in other advanced industrial countries. What saved these faiths from extinction was the reluctance of local party and government officials to be quite as brutal to people of their own ethnic group as central party policy demanded. In Tajikistan and in the villages of Azerbaijan there was general revulsion at the intrusion of militant Marxism-Leninism. Many functionaries themselves continued to practise Islam in the privacy of their homes.

This situation makes it impossible to know how many religious believers existed. A later survey carried out in Moscow province in 1970 suggested that 16 per cent of men and 45 per cent of women held a faith in God.²³ The younger generation believed less than the older. Furthermore, people lower down the social hierarchy believed more than those higher up, and villagers believed more than urban inhabitants. If this was the pattern of religious belief in a highly-urbanized province such as Moscow, it must be assumed that religion was much more densely practised elsewhere.

Khrushchëv was furious. While lowering the number of political prisoners in the Gulag, he showed no mercy to religious activists: 1,500 of them, at the very lowest estimate, were locked up by the early 1960s. A troublesome pair of Orthodox archbishops, Andrei of Chernigov and Iov of Kazan, were put to forced labour.²⁴ That so many harmless Soviet citizens were subjected to such maltreatment is a sign that the state was very far from succeeding in indoctrinating society. There is a paradox here. Enthusiastic Marxist-Leninists tended to be newcomers — including Mikhail Gorbachëv — to the positions of power. But most of the sons and daughters of the current generation of high-ranking central officials did not give a fig for the Party Programme; and when such youngsters of privileged backgrounds had an opportunity to visit foreign parts, many of them returned with a hankering for Western jeans and pop music. The language of Marxism-Leninism was used by them in furtherance of careers; but in their homes they avoided such verbiage. The worm had entered the apple: the offspring of the nomenklatura despised the state ideology.

Meanwhile all was not well within officialdom itself. The pre-war and wartime cohort of functionaries in party, police, army and government were disoriented by the recent innovations; they were uncomfortable, too, with the recurrent attacks on Stalin, who was venerated by many of them. As the years passed, they tended to forget that Stalin had killed a large number of persons like themselves. Khrushchëv increasingly annoyed them. While they desired certainty and reassurance, he brought them only disturbance.

This was true not only in Moscow but also in the provinces. Few party secretaries had more than a brief party-school education. Local politicians flattered Khrushchëv at Congresses and fawned upon him whenever he paid a visit to their locality. No ruler in Russian history, not even the energetic Peter the Great, had gone to so many parts of his country. But once out of the range of his surveillance, they gave priority to their personal comforts. They drank and ate; they used the special shops which were barred to the general public. They were chauffeured everywhere. They took well-appointed holidays by the Black Sea and participated in official Soviet delegations to the countries of Eastern Europe. They grabbed access to higher education and to professional jobs for members of their families regardless of their qualifications. They lived in cantonments separate from the common run of humanity.

Khrushchëv himself delighted in occupying his palatial dacha at Pitsunda; he gladly received gifts from foreign statesmen, especially if they were rifles or scientific instruments.²⁵ (How he would have loved hand-held computer games!) Nor did he refrain from dispensing jobs, titles and privileges to close relatives. This proponent of communism would never have liked communist egalitarianism in reality, and he was so accustomed to the luxuries of office that he was incapable of recognizing his hypocrisy.

What irked Khrushchëv was not so much the morality of officials in the provinces as their uncontrollability. But his own measures in fact contributed to the problem. The combination of economic decentralization and political consultation served to strengthen localist tendencies. Aping Lenin and Stalin, Khrushchëv set up special supervisory bodies. One such was the Committee of Party-State Control; but this was no more able to bring institutions and their officials to heel than any of its predecessors. The custom of fudging figures on industrial and agricultural output according to self-interest was ineliminable. Khrushchëv, like his predecessors, reacted with campaigns of mass mobilization. Ordinary party members and the general public were encouraged to blow the whistle on illegalities and disobedience. The difficulty was that the entire Soviet order exerted a pressure on everyone to be deceitful in everyday life. Eradication of all the fiddles would really have necessitated a revolution.

At the lowest levels of society the joke went the rounds: ‘They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work!’ Soviet workers saw no point in being more punctual, co-operative and conscientious than they absolutely had to be. Theft from farms and factories was not regarded with popular disapproval. Individuals looked after themselves, their families and their close friends. Khrushchëv, who had expected that people would toil tirelessly for the communist common weal, was deeply frustrated; but the Novocherkassk uprising had shown that, unless he slackened his demands on society, the entire political status quo might be challenged.

An ever-growing menace to his position and his plans came from higher levels. Ostensibly he was unchallengeable. The ministries, the KGB, the trade unions and the party shared his commitment to maintaining the Soviet order; and these same institutions were subject to the Party Presidium. They could select representatives to put their case to the Presidium. Khrushchëv could even brow-beat the Soviet Army. He not only sacked Zhukov in 1957 but also reduced the number of troops from 5.8 million to 3.7 million in the second half of the decade.²⁶ His justification was that the USSR’s nuclear weaponry provided a more adequate base for the country’s defence than conventional land and air forces. Khrushchëv had depended upon the Soviet Army’s assistance in his struggle against the Anti-Party Group; and Zhukov, at the moment of his sacking, had warned Khrushchëv that even Marshal Moskalenko, one of Khrushchëv’s favourites, had been talking about the desirability of a coup d’état.²⁷ But Khrushchëv refused to be bullied by such talk. He was totally confident that power at last lay firmly in the hands of the civilian politicians.

His willingness to think the unthinkable was proved in September 1962 when he permitted a debate in Pravda on economic reform. The main participant, Yevsei Liberman, urged the desirability of according greater autonomy to factory managers in decisions about production, sales and labour inputs. This project would have impinged upon the prerogatives of Gosplan and the entire police-party-military-industrial complex. Not since the 1920s had managers enjoyed the authority proposed by Liberman.

Whether Khrushchëv’s heart lay in so basic a reform is questionable. As Stalin’s legatee, he never seriously tried to lower the proportion of the country’s gross investment in the capital-goods sector. Resources were poured into defence production in particular. Rather than offer autonomy to managers, he suggested yet another institutional reorganization in September 1962. The agency he picked to mobilize economic advance was the party. In a note written to the Presidium, Khrushchëv suggested that each local party committee should be split into two separate committees to deal respectively with industry and agriculture. This bipartition, he argued, would concentrate attention upon both sectors of economic production in each province. His colleagues regarded it as a bureaucratic nonsense which would make demarcation of responsibilities even more complicated than at present; but they yielded to him when he insisted on implementing the scheme.

He had raised most members of the central political élite to their posts: Frol Kozlov, Leonid Brezhnev and Nikolai Podgorny were his protégés; and other figures who had built careers independently of him, notably Mikhail Suslov and Aleksei Kosygin, had gained additional promotion through his efforts. He grossly underestimated their dislike of his interminable reorganizations, a dislike that was shared at lower levels of the party’s hierarchy. The scheme for the party’s bipartition caused particular irritation in the localities. Each provincial party secretary who had previously run the party throughout a province was being asked to choose between industry and agriculture in his province. No official welcomed this abrupt reduction in power.

Khrushchëv had become too isolated to discern this. Certainly he was careful to consult colleagues on foreign policy. In August 1961, for example, he obtained the preliminary sanction of the Presidium for the building of a wall between the Soviet and Western sectors of Berlin. For years there had been an exodus of the German Democratic Republic’s citizens to West Germany, and one of the results had been the loss of doctors, engineers and other professional people. Khrushchëv rather shamefacedly argued that the German Democratic Republic ‘had yet to reach a level of moral and material development where competition with the West was possible’;²⁸ but the building of the Berlin Wall was disastrous for Soviet prestige around the world. In trying to put pressure on the NATO governments, moreover, he resumed the testing of Soviet nuclear bombs. He wanted to show that the USSR was capable of defending its interests under his guidance.

He also had the Presidium’s consent in trying to extend the country’s influence elsewhere in the world. Soviet leaders had always been angry about the USA’s placement of nuclear missile facilities in Turkey on the USSR’s borders. The communist revolution under Fidel Castro gave rise to a plan for the Soviet Union to construct similar facilities on the Caribbean island of Cuba, not far from the Florida coast. Khrushchëv and his advisers, with Castro’s enthusiastic participation, made the necessary preparations in 1962.

American spy-planes picked out the unusual construction-work being carried out in Cuba. In October 1962 President Kennedy, before the Soviet missiles could complete their voyage to the Caribbean, declared that Cuba would be placed in military quarantine. Soviet ships would be stopped and searched for missiles. Castro recklessly urged Khrushchëv to bomb American cities, but was brushed aside as a madman.²⁹ For a few days the diplomats of the USSR and the USA faced the possibility of a Third World War. Khrushchëv had badly underestimated Kennedy’s will. The old dog, far from intimidating the young pup, had to give way. The ships were turned back, and the Soviet regime was humbled in the eyes of the world. In fact Kennedy had made a substantial concession to Khrushchëv by promising both to dismantle the Turkish facilities and never to invade Cuba. The snag was that this compromise was to be a secret between the American and Soviet administrations.

Presidium members had been consulted by Khrushchëv throughout the crisis; but it was he who had brought the Cuban proposal to their attention, and therefore it was he alone who was blamed by them for the USSR’s humiliation. Khrushchëv had run out of luck. All the main economic data indicated that his policies were running into trouble. The harvest of 1963 was nine per cent lower than in the previous year. The fodder crop was so inadequate that imports had to take place for the first time — a deeply-annoying development at a time when the Presidium needed to use its hard-currency funds for the purchase of Western industrial technology.³⁰

There was scarcely a group, organization or institution that did not hate Khrushchëv. He had offended the party, the economic ministries, the generals, the diplomatic service, the intelligentsia, the managers and the security police. His achievements were undeniable, especially in the ending of terror and the raising of the general standard of living. But further improvement was not forthcoming; and Khrushchëv’s futurological boasts, his idiosyncratic bossiness and his obsessive reorganizations had taken their toll on the patience of practically everyone. He was a complex leader. At once he was a Stalinist and anti-Stalinist, a communist believer and cynic, a self-publicizing poltroon and a crusty philanthropist, a trouble-maker and a peacemaker, a stimulating colleague and domineering bore, a statesman and a politicker who was out of his intellectual depth. His contradictions were the product of an extraordinary personality and a lifetime of extraordinary experiences.

Yet it must be appreciated that his eccentricities in high office also resulted from the immense, conflicting pressures upon him. Unlike his successors, he was willing to try to respond to them by seeking long-term solutions. But the attempted solutions were insufficient to effect the renovation of the kind of state and society he espoused. Reforms were long overdue. His political, economic and cultural accomplishments were a great improvement over Stalin. But they fell greatly short of the country’s needs.

19 Stabilization (1964–1970)

The Soviet political system since 1917 had developed few fixed regulations. When Lenin died there was no assumption that a single successor should be selected. The same was true at Stalin’s death. No effort had yet been made to establish rules about the succession even though it was by then taken for granted that whoever was appointed to lead the Secretariat would rule the country. In mid-1964, as Khrushchëv’s colleagues wondered what to do about him, this uncertainty persisted and they also had the problem that the Party First Secretary was not dead but alive and capable of retaliating.

Khrushchëv returned from trips to Scandinavia and Czechoslovakia in summer. Sensing nothing afoot, he took a break at Pitsunda by the Black Sea in October. He was still fit for a man of seventy. His Presidium colleagues had recently congratulated him at his birthday celebrations and wished him well in political office, and the First Secretary took them at their word. Mikoyan popped over to chat with him and hinted to him not to be complacent. But Khrushchëv ignored the allusion; instead he waited with bated breath for news that the latest team of Soviet cosmonauts had returned safely to earth. As was his wont, he arranged to greet them in person. Everything seemed well to him despite an alarm raised by a chauffeur who had overheard details of a plot to oust the First Secretary.¹ He who had outplayed Beria refused to believe that he might one day meet his match.

The Presidium had in fact put together a peaceful plot involving older colleagues like Brezhnev and Suslov as well as the younger ones such as Shelepin and Semichastny. KGB chief Semichastny’s betrayal was crucial since it was properly his duty to inform Khrushchëv of any such conspiracy. The plotters had also used former Central Committee Secretary Nikolai Ignatov, who had been sacked by Khrushchëv, to take discreet soundings among Central Committee members. Nothing was left to chance.

The only thing left to decide was about the timing. After several false starts, Suslov made a phone call to Khrushchëv on 12 October 1964 and requested that he fly to Moscow for an unscheduled Presidium discussion of agriculture. At last Khrushchëv guessed what was in store; for he said to Mikoyan: ‘If it’s me who is the question, I won’t make a fight of it.’ Next day, when his plane landed at Vnukovo 2 Airport, Semichastny’s men isolated him and rushed him to a Presidium meeting in the Kremlin. Initially Mikoyan worked for a compromise whereby Khrushchëv would lose the First Secretaryship but remain Chairman of the Council of Ministers. But the rest of the Presidium wanted Khrushchëv completely retired. Eventually the old man buckled under the strain and tearfully requested: ‘Comrades, forgive me if I’m guilty of anything. We worked together. True, we didn’t accomplish everything.’ Unconditional surrender followed: ‘Obviously it will now be as you wish. What can I say? I’ve got what I deserved.’²

On 14 October, an emergency Central Committee plenum was held. It was attended by 153 out of 169 members. Brezhnev was in the chair since the Presidium had already agreed that he should become Party First Secretary. After briefly referring to Khrushchëv’s ‘cult of the individual’ and ‘voluntaristic actions’, he vacated the podium so that Suslov might make a report. The Central Committee needed to hear from someone who had no close association with Khrushchëv.³

Suslov asserted that what Lenin had said about Stalin’s crudity and capriciousness was also applicable to Khrushchëv. The principles of collective leadership had been infringed, and Khrushchëv had intrigued to set colleague against colleague. Policy had been changed without consultation. Khrushchëv had arbitrarily introduced outsiders to Central Committee meetings. He had promoted members of his family and taken them on expensive foreign trips. His interventions in industry were bad, in agriculture even worse. His reorganizations had damaged the party, and he had behaved high-handedly towards the countries of the Warsaw Pact. He had replaced the Stalin cult with a Khrushchëv cult. ‘So there you have it,’ declaimed Suslov. ‘Not leadership but a complete merry-go-round!’ Suslov’s tone was softened only towards the end when he read out a letter from Khrushchëv recognizing the validity of the criticisms.⁴

Emotions in the audience were highly charged and several Central Committee members shouted out that Khrushchëv should undergo punishment of some sort. But Brezhnev was already assured of victory, and ignored such demands. Khrushchëv, depressed and contrite, was shunted into comfortable retirement. He was hardly mentioned in the press again in his lifetime. In the contemporary Western term, he became a ‘non-person’ overnight.

Khrushchëv none the less came to regard the manner of his going with some satisfaction. No guns, no executions. Not even many sackings apart from his own. Brezhnev would head the Central Committee Secretariat and Kosygin the Council of Ministers; Podgorny, as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was to become head of state. They and their associates approved of the general line taken by the party since 1953; but they wished to introduce greater stability to policies and institutions. New themes appeared in Pravda: collective leadership, scientific planning, consultation with expert opinion, organizational regularity and no light-headed schemes. At Khrushchëv’s going there was no popular commotion. On the contrary, there was a widespread feeling of relief; even the dour image cultivated by Brezhnev, Kosygin and Podgorny seemed admirable after Khrushchëv’s unsettling ebullience. Most Soviet citizens, including the intellectuals, anticipated a period of steady development for Soviet economy and society.

Certain early decisions on policy were predictable. The Central Committee plenum in October 1964 forbade any single person from holding the two supreme posts in the party and government simultaneously. In November the bipartition of local party committees was rescinded. In the winter of 1964–5 overtures were made to Mao Zedong to close the breach between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China. In October 1965 the sovnarkhozes were abolished and the old central ministries were restored.

Yet there was no consensus about what substantial innovations should be made. Shelepin, who was made Presidium member after helping to organize Khrushchëv’s dismissal, made a bid for the supreme leadership in February 1965 by calling for a restoration of obedience and order. He disliked the concept of the ‘all-people’s state’; he wanted to resume an ideological offensive against Yugoslavia; and he showed a fondness for the good old days in his confidential support for the rehabilitation of Stalin’s reputation.⁵ ‘Iron Shurik’, as he was nicknamed, got nowhere in the Presidium. He did not help himself by parading his contempt for his older colleagues and by proposing to cut back the perks enjoyed by party office-holders. Brezhnev was not yet strong enough to remove him from the Presidium; but in 1967 he directed him out of harm’s way by moving him from the Committee of Party-State Control to the USSR Central Council of Trade Unions.

The Presidium member who struggled the hardest for any positive sort of reform was Kosygin. Brezhnev had kept up an interest in agriculture since guiding the virgin lands campaign in Kazakhstan; but mainly he busied himself with internal party affairs. It was Kosygin who initiated a reconsideration of economic policy. Yevsei Liberman’s proposal of 1962 for an increase in the rights of factory managers was dusted down and presented by Kosygin to the Central Committee in September 1965.⁶

Kosygin did not open the door to complete managerial freedom: even Liberman had avoided that, and Kosygin as a practising politician was yet more cautious. Yet the implications of his reforms were large. If the heads of enterprises were to operate with reduced interference by Gosplan, then the authority of economic ministries and the party would decline. Kosygin’s long-standing advocacy of the consumer-goods sector of industrial investment increased his colleagues’ suspicion of him. Party officials were especially annoyed at his proposal to reduce the authority of economic-branch departments in the Central Committee Secretariat. The post-war organizational dispute between Malenkov and Zhdanov was re-emerging as Kosygin challenged the interests of the central party apparatus. If Kosygin had had his way, the premisses of economic policy would stealthily be shifted towards profit-making, managerial initiative and ministerial freedom from the party’s interference.

Brezhnev decided that his best stratagem was not to confront Kosygin but to position himself between Kosygin and Shelepin until he could bring his own appointees into the Presidium. With Brezhnev’s approval, the Central Committee gave formal permission to Kosygin to go ahead with the reforms; but all the while Brezhnev, both at the plenum and afterwards, impeded him with unhelpful modifications.

He quietly went about enhancing his own authority, ringing up provincial party secretaries for their opinion at each stage. He often spent a couple of hours each day on such conversations. His modesty seemed impressive. On the Kremlin Wall he was indistinguishable from the other late middle-aged men in staid suits and staider hats. At the March 1965 Central Committee plenum he displayed his preferences in policy by getting a larger share of the budget for agriculture (which was another sign that Kosygin’s industrial proposals were not going to be allowed to work). Brezhnev regarded chemical fertilizers and advanced mechanical equipment as the main solution to the grain shortage. He had concluded that budgetary redistribution rather than Khrushchëvian rhetoric and reorganization was the most effective instrument of progress. His primary objective was to make the existing system work better and work harder.

Brezhnev’s stabilization of politics and administration after the upsets of Khrushchëv also led him to clamp down on cultural freedom. As Khrushchëv had become more illiberal, many intellectuals had taken to meeting in little groups and circulating typescripts of poems, novels and manifestos that were certain to be refused publication. This method of communication was known as samizdat (or self-publishing); and it was to acquire a broader technical range when tape-recorder cassettes became available. The latter method was known as magnitizdat.

The participants in such groupings grew in number as access to official publication narrowed. Roy Medvedev’s book on the Great Terror, which itemized previously-unknown details of Stalin’s activity, was banned from the press. The same fate befell Viktor Danilov’s opus on agricultural collectivization at the end of the 1920s. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote two lengthy novels, The First Circle and Cancer Ward, describing the lower levels of the political and social hierarchy under Stalin. He, too, had his works rejected or even ‘arrested’ by the KGB. Andrei Sakharov wrote letters to the Presidium requesting freedom of opinion and self-expression, but to no avail. A lesson was given to them that the avenues of consultation with the country’s supreme political leadership that had been kept semi-open under Khrushchëv were being closed. The cultural spring turned to autumn without an intermediate summer.

And a chilly winter was imminent. In September 1965 the KGB arrested two writers, Andrei Sinyavski and Yuli Daniel, who had circulated some satirical tales in samizdat about the Soviet state. They were put on trial in the following February and charged under Article No. 70 of the Criminal Code with spreading ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’. Sinyavski and Daniel were unyielding, and sympathizers demonstrated on their behalf outside the Moscow court building. Yet they were found guilty and sentenced to forced labour in the Gulag.⁷

The principal embarrassment to the Presidium was that the trial had lasted so long. New articles were therefore added to the Code so as to expedite matters in the future. The result was that dissenters could quickly be branded as common criminals, parasites or even traitors. The dissenters referred to themselves as ‘other-thinkers’ (inakomyshlyashchie). This was a neat term which encapsulated the origin of their predicament: namely that they disagreed with the postulates of the ruling ideology. Certainly it was more accurate than the word favoured in the West, ‘dissidents’. The etymological root of dissidence implies a sitting apart; but Soviet ‘other-thinkers’ were by no means distant from the rest of society: indeed they shared the living conditions of ordinary citizens; even a leading scientist such as Sakharov had most of his comforts withdrawn as soon as he became a dissenter. What was different about the dissenters was their willingness to make an overt challenge to the regime.

Starting in 1968, the samizdat journal The Chronicle of Current Events appeared. It was produced on typewriters with sheaves of carbon paper tucked into them. In 1970 a Human Rights Committee was formed by Andrei Sakharov, Valeri Chalidze and Andrei Tverdokhlebov. In 1971 an Estonian National Front was created in Tallinn. In Moscow, the priests Gleb Yakunin and Dmitri Dudko gathered Christian followers who demanded freedom of faith. Jewish organizations were established for the purpose of gaining visas to emigrate to Israel.

By the mid-1970s there were reckoned to be about 10,000 political and religious prisoners across the Soviet Union. They were held in grievous conditions, most of them being given less than the intake of calories and proteins sufficient to prevent malnutrition. Punishments for disobedience in the camps were severe and the guards were both venal and brutal. But labour camps were not the sole methods used by the KGB. Punitive psychiatry, which had been used under Khrushchëv, was extended after 1964. Medicine became an arm of coercive state control as doctors were instructed to expect an influx of cases of ‘paranoiac schizophrenia’ shortly before public festivals; and many persistent dissenters were confined for years in mental asylums. Meanwhile the KGB maintained a vast network of informers and agents provocateurs. No group operated for long without being infiltrated by them, and the security police also tried to demoralize camp inmates into repenting their past.

Yet Brezhnev and his colleagues refrained from all-out violent suppression. They had not forgotten how the Great Terror had affected party leaders such as they had now become. Furthermore, they did not want to incur greater hostility from the intelligentsia than was absolutely necessary; they continually stressed that they would treat the opinions of professional experts seriously. Consequently dissent was not eliminated, but was held at a low level of intensity.

Brezhnev himself had a kindly reputation among political colleagues and in his family; and he can hardly have been consistently anti-Semitic since his wife Viktoria was Jewish.⁸ But first and foremost he was an apparatchik, a functionary of the party apparatus, and an ambitious, energetic one at that. When appointed as First Secretary, he was fifty-eight years old. He had been born to a Russian working-class family in Ukraine in 1906 and had no involvement in the October Revolution or Civil War. He became a communist party member towards the end of the First Five-Year Plan and qualified as an engineer in 1935. He had just the background to enter politics in Dneprodzherzhinsk as the Great Terror raged. By 1939 he was working in the party apparatus in Dnepropetrovsk in Ukraine. In the Second World War he served as a commissar on both the Southern and Ukrainian fronts. Attaining the rank of Major-General, he made impression enough on Khrushchëv to be taken under his patronage and marked out for rapid promotion.

No one who had held this succession of posts could have been over-endowed with moral sensitivity. Collusion in repression was a job specification. So, too, was an ability to trim to the changing winds of official policy; and most functionaries of the pre-war generation were more like Brezhnev than Khrushchëv: they had learned to avoid being seen to have independent opinions. Brezhnev’s guiding aim was to avoid getting himself into trouble with higher authority.

He therefore stamped ruthlessly upon the ‘bourgeois nationalism’ of Romanian speakers when appointed as the Moldavian Communist Party First Secretary in 1950. He was put on the Presidium by Stalin in 1952 as a member of the younger generation of Soviet leaders. Losing this status on Stalin’s death, he rejoined the Presidium after the Twentieth Party Congress. By then he had played a major part in the virgin lands campaign, and photographs of him by Khrushchëv’s side became frequent in Pravda. Meanwhile he built up his own power-base by recruiting personnel from among his associates from his time as Dnepropetrovsk Province Party Secretary. He had a handsome look with his generous grin and his shock of black hair — and he was proud of his appearance. Only his pragmatic need to subsume his personality under the demands of ‘collective leadership’ stopped him from shining in the glare of the world’s media.

And yet it would have been a brightness of style, not of substance; and the style, too, would have been dulled by Brezhnev’s defects as a public speaker. He had no oral panache. He was also very limited intellectually, and acknowledged this in private: ‘I can’t grasp all this. On the whole, to be frank, this isn’t my field. My strong point is organization and psychology.’⁹ This comment hit the mark. For indeed Brezhnev was masterly at planning an agenda so as to maximize consensus. Always he strove to circumvent direct conflict with colleagues. Even when he decided to get rid of someone, he carried out the task with charm.

Such qualities were embarrassingly narrow for the leader of one of the world’s superpowers. And Brezhnev’s vanity was extraordinary. For instance, he shunted the Moscow City Party Secretary N. G. Yegorychev into an obscure ambassadorship for refusing to sing his praises.¹⁰ Moreover, he was indifferent to problems of corruption. ‘Nobody,’ he casually opined, ‘lives just on his wages.’¹¹ He permitted his family to set a grotesque example. His daughter Galina was a promiscuous alcoholic who took up with a circus director running a gold-bullion fraud gang. Brezhnev himself outdid Khrushchëv in the nepotism for which he had criticized him. Nor did he forget to be generous to himself. His passion was to add to his fleet of foreign limousines donated to him by the leaders of states abroad. He drove them on the roads between his dacha and the Kremlin with flagrant disregard for public safety.

Yet it was initially a distinct point of attraction for his central party colleagues that Brezhnev was so undistinguished. Each Presidium member expected to be able to guide the First Secretary in policy-making. They had underestimated him. Shelepin and Kosygin were steadily being worn down. Podgorny, who wanted Brezhnev kept in check, had no personal following in the Presidium; and Suslov apparently had no ambition to become the supreme leader, preferring to exercise influence behind the scenes.¹² Brezhnev’s fellow leaders perceived that he was becoming more than primus inter pares among them only when it was too late to reverse the process.

Brezhnev had helped to make his own luck. But he was also assisted by the trends of current economic data. Khrushchëv had lost his political offices partly as a result of the poor grain harvest of 1963. He was sacked just before the encouraging news of the harvest of 1964 had become fully available. The improvement continued in the immediately following years. Between 1960 and 1970 Soviet agricultural output increased at an annual average of three per cent.¹³ Industry, too, enhanced its performance. At the end of the Eighth Five-Year Plan period of 1966–70 the output of factories and mines was 138 per cent greater than in 1960.¹⁴ At the same time the regime was effective in maintaining strict political control. There were several disparate strikes, but nothing remotely akin to the Novocherkassk uprising of 1962. The authorities had a tight grip on society, and Brezhnev’s prestige grew among members of the Soviet political élite.

The Twenty-Third Party Congress, which began on 29 March 1966, changed the name of the Presidium back to the Politburo and allocated eleven members to it. The post held by Brezhnev was redesignated as the General Secretaryship (as it had been known in the 1920s). This hint at continuity with the Stalin era was meant to emphasize that the disruptions of Khrushchëv’s rule were at an end. Since Brezhnev wanted to avoid the Politburo turning on him as he and his colleagues had turned upon Khrushchëv, very few sackings occurred in the central party leadership. For a while only the most dangerous opponents were removed. In particular, Shelepin’s ally Semichastny was replaced by Yuri Andropov as KGB chairman in May 1967; and Shelepin himself was moved out of the Committee of Party-State Control in June and out of the Party Secretariat in September.

The Politburo was still feeling its way towards settled policies. This was especially obvious in its handling of those countries in Eastern Europe where economic reforms were being implemented. Hungarian party leader János Kádár had introduced measures similar to those advocated by Kosygin in the USSR. He got away with this because he had moved stealthily while Khrushchëv was in power and because he had Kosygin’s protection after Khrushchëv’s retirement. By 1968 a New Economic Mechanism which included limited permission for the creation of retail markets had been introduced. In Poland a different approach was taken. Władisław Gomułka had failed to fulfil his promises of industrial and agricultural growth and was removed in favour of Eduard Gierek in 1970. The new Polish government raised huge Western loans to facilitate the rapid expansion of heavy industry. Financial support and technological transfer, Gierek argued, would unblock the country’s economic bottlenecks.

The Soviet communist leaders gave approval to both the Hungarian and the Polish experiments not least because the USSR could ill afford to maintain its massive subsidy of the East European countries in the form of cheap oil and gas exports. In any case the basic structures of the centrally-planned economy remained in place in both countries.

Less contentment was shown by the Soviet Politburo with the policies adopted by the communist leadership in Czechoslavakia. At first there had been little cause for concern. Czechoslovak party leader Antonin Novotný had become as unpopular as Gomułka in Poland, and Brezhnev on his visit to Prague in December 1967 refused to intervene in the factional dispute. Novotný resigned in January 1968 and was succeeded by Alexander Dubček. The consequence was the ‘Prague Spring’. Dubček and his colleagues allowed the emergence of independent pressure groups; they allowed the mass media to criticize the Czechoslovak official authorities, not excluding himself. The trade unions resumed the role of defence of workers’ interests, and market reforms of the Hungarian type were treated as a minimum short-term aim. Dubček, hoping to create a ‘socialism with a human face’, still thought of himself as a Leninist. But by introducing so many checks on the communist party dictatorship, he was unknowingly rejecting the main tenets of Lenin’s thought and practice.

His cardinal error lay in assuming that he could pull the Soviet Politburo along with him. In Moscow, the Czech reforms were seen as threatening the existence of one-party rule, the centrally-planned economy and the survival of Eastern Europe as an exclusively communist zone. Brezhnev sent his emissaries to Prague over the summer to pull him back into line. But Dubček ignored all the hints that his intransigence would incur a military penalty.

On the night of 20–21 August 1968 the tanks of the Warsaw Pact rolled into Czechoslovakia. The decision had been taken in the Soviet Politburo. Kosygin had wavered earlier in the summer, remembering the complications around the world that had followed the suppression of the Hungarian revolt.¹⁵ Brezhnev, too, had not always been enthusiastic. But the vote in the Politburo was unanimously in favour of invasion. Brezhnev was later to affirm that ‘if I hadn’t voted in the Politburo for military intervention, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here now’. In the meantime Hungarian leader Kádár had tried to dispel Dubček’s naïvety: ‘Don’t you understand what kind of people you are dealing with?’ Dubček rebuffed the warning; and when the tanks arrived in Prague, he was taken prisoner and flown to Russia, where he was injected with drugs and threatened with execution unless he complied with the USSR’s orders. Dubček succumbed, but with obvious heavy reluctance, and in spring 1969 the Soviet Politburo put the compliant Gustav Husak in power.

After a brief period as Czechoslovak ambassador to Turkey, Dubček was demoted to the job of local forest administrator. A bloodless purge of the participants in the Prague Spring was put in hand. No country of the Warsaw Pact was permitted to follow policies involving the slightest derogation from the premisses of the one-party state, Marxism-Leninism and Warsaw Pact membership. The Brezhnev Doctrine was imposed, whereby upon any threat to ‘socialism’ in any country of the Pact, the other member countries of the Pact had the right and duty to intervene militarily.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia had baleful consequences for the political and economic debates in the USSR. Ideological retrenchment was inevitable. This was appreciated by dissenters outside the party such as Pavel Litvinov, who led a small group of protesters on Red Square on 23 August. The participants were seized by police, put on trial in October and sentenced to three years in prison camps.¹⁶ Litvinov’s treatment could easily have been worse; but within the Politburo there was reluctance to resort to greater repression than was deemed completely necessary. The measures were anyway severe enough for the intelligentsia to lose any remaining illusions about Brezhnev. Khrushchëv, who spent his days at his dacha telling tales to visitors who came out to picnic in the woods, was becoming a figure of nostalgia among artists and scholars. A siege mentality gripped the regime: if a Gorbachëv had existed in the Kremlin in 1968, he would have been arrested.

The USA assured the USSR that the invasion of Czechoslovakia would not cause a world war and that Western political revulsion would not get in the way of negotiations between the superpowers. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed in 1969 and Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were begun in the same year. By 1970 the USSR had caught up with its rival in the number of its intercontinental ballistic missiles. But both Moscow and Washington were keen that competition in military preparedness should occur in a predictable, non-violent fashion.

Yet the Czechoslovak invasion damaged the USSR irreparably inside the global communist movement. Hopes for a reconciliation with China had been slim since 1966, when Mao Zedong had castigated Moscow as a ‘centre of modern revisionism’ that had betrayed the principles of Marx, Engels and Lenin. After 1968 the number of critics grew. Albania, Romania and Yugoslavia condemned the Brezhnev Doctrine; and when seventy-five communist parties met in Moscow in June 1969, the polemics were incessant. Only sixty-one parties agreed to sign the main document at the conference. World communism had definitively become polycentric. Indeed border skirmishes broke out along the Siberian border with the People’s Republic of China. All-out war was a possibility until Moscow and Beijing each concluded that a diplomatic settlement was in its interest. The Politburo was finding relations with China as intractable as at any time under Khrushchëv.

Not that everything in foreign affairs was problematical. Kosygin, Brezhnev and Podgorny followed Khrushchëv’s precedent by visiting several foreign countries. In 1966 the USSR had brought India and Pakistan together under Kosygin’s chairmanship in Tashkent to settle their recurrent conflicts. The Soviet-Indian relationship was especially warm.¹⁷ Furthermore, Cuba remained defiantly pro-Soviet despite an American diplomatic and economic embargo, and in 1970 the Marxist coalition leader Salvador Allende came to power in Chile. In Asia, North Vietnam, fighting with Soviet military equipment, was wearing down the American-supported regime in South Vietnam. In Europe, the USSR had its successes even after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. As soon as Willy Brandt was elected German Chancellor in Bonn in 1969, he made overtures to the Kremlin. A treaty was signed between the USSR and the Federal Republic of Germany in the following year giving formal recognition to the separate German Democratic Republic.

Elsewhere in the non-communist world the attempts to increase Soviet power and prestige were not quite so productive. In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah was chased from power in 1966. His departure left the USSR without friends in Africa except for Egypt. Then Egypt, too, fell away. In 1967 Soviet influence in the Middle East was undermined when Israeli forces defeated an Arab military coalition in the Six-Day War. President Nasser of Egypt died in 1970 and was succeeded by Anwar Sadat, who saw no advantage in keeping close ties with the USSR. The Soviet-Egyptian alliance rapidly collapsed. Countries of the Third World were finding that the USSR might be able to supply them adequately with military equipment but could not sustain them economically. It was increasingly understood around the globe that occasional acts of munificence such as the financing of the Aswan Dam did not generate long-term industrial and agricultural development.

Yet the campaign to increase Moscow’s influence abroad was sustained. At home, furthermore, central political prerogatives were asserted. The Politburo abandoned the decentralizing experiments of Khrushchëv. In 1966 its members scrapped the sovnarkhozes. Inside the party, the Bureau of the RSFSR in the Central Committee — established by Khrushchëv — was abolished. Thus the largest republic by far in the USSR lost its co-ordinating party body. The other republics still had their own parties, central committees and first secretaries. The humbling of the RSFSR signified that no national political unit, not even the Russian, was immune to the Politburo’s supra-national demands.

Accordingly, the other republics were placed under tight discipline. Eighteen well-known Ukrainian nationalist and intellectual dissenters were brought to court in Kiev in August 1965 — a full month before the arrest of Daniel and Sinyavski in Moscow. They refused to disown their beliefs and received harsh prison sentences. Also in 1965 there was a large demonstration in Erevan, protesting about past and present injustices against the Armenian people. It was suppressed by armed force. The subsequent invasion of Czechoslovakia horrified nationalist opinion, especially in the Baltic Soviet republics and Ukraine. A student was arrested in the Estonian city of Tartu for daubing a cinema wall with the declaration: ‘Czechs, we are your brothers.’ But disturbances also occurred independently of the Prague events. Riots broke out in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, in 1969. Several officials of Russian nationality were murdered before sufficient troops arrived to restore control.

In the Politburo there were lively discussions. It would seem that Alexander Shelepin and Dmitri Polyanski took the strongest line in advocating the eradication of national dissent among non-Russians. It was rumoured that Polyanski’s ideas were virtually those of a Russian nationalist. On the other side there was Petro Shelest, First Secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee, who believed that any further scouring of Ukrainian culture would open wounds that would turn the Ukrainian speakers of his republic into irretrievable opponents of a ‘Soviet Ukraine’. Shelest himself had a deep sympathy for the traditions of the Cossacks.

Brezhnev steered a middle course between them. In November 1967 he called for the ‘convergence’ of the Soviet Union’s peoples, but stressed that this would involve highly-sensitive decisions and that hastiness had to be avoided. Even so, neither Brezhnev nor even Shelest was diffident about quelling overt opposition whether it came in mass demonstrations or in poems, songs and booklets. This meant that the basic problems of a multinational state were suppressed rather than resolved. Russian nationalists resented the fact that their culture was not allowed to develop outside the distortive framework imposed by the Politburo. Among the non-Russians, nationalists resented what they perceived as the Politburo’s Russian chauvinism; their grievances were ably summarized in Ivan Dziuba’s lengthy memorandum to the Ukrainian party and government, Internationalism or Russification?¹⁸

Ostensibly most republic-level communist party leaders endorsed the suppression of nationalism in the various Soviet republics. Eduard Shevardnadze, who was installed as Party First Secretary in Georgia in 1972, rhapsodized that ‘the true sun rose not in the East but in the North, in Russia — the sun of Leninist ideas’. Sharaf Rashidov, the First Secretary of the Uzbekistan Communist Party, eulogized the Russian people as ‘the elder brother and true friend’ of the Uzbeks.¹⁹

When at home in Uzbekistan, Rashidov was not so self-abasing; on the contrary, he was promoting his fellow clan members into high office and ensuring that they could benefit from the perks of office without Moscow’s interference. The same had been happening in Georgia under Shevardnadze’s predecessor V. P. Mzhavanadze — and Shevardnadze’s subsequent struggle against corruption had only limited success. Even Dinmukhammed Kunaev, First Secretary of the Kazakhstan Communist Party and boon companion of Brezhnev, covertly gave protection to emergent national aspirations. Rashidov, Mzhavanadze and Kunaev zealously locked up overt nationalist dissenters in their respective republics; but they increasingly themselves selected and organized the local élites on a national principle. Such phenomena were also on the rise in the RSFSR, whose internal autonomous republics were allowed much freedom to promote the interests of the local national majority.

The Politburo’s own commitment to ‘stability of cadres’ contributed to the difficulties of holding together the USSR as a multinational state. Brezhnev assured officials in the party and major governmental institutions that their jobs were secure so long as they did not infringe current official policies. He wanted to avoid the enmity incurred by Khrushchëv’s endless sackings of personnel; he also contended that officials needed stable working conditions if the Politburo’s objectives were to be realized in the localities. Consequently Mzhavanadze’s replacement by Shevardnadze was a rare direct attempt to indicate to the official leaderships of the non-Russian republics that there were limits to the Kremlin’s indulgence.

A general lightness of touch was applied in the Russian provinces of the RSFSR. Leningrad Party Secretary V. S. Tolstikov was sacked in 1970. Tolstikov had drawn attention to himself as a communist arch-conservative, but the reason for his dismissal was not politics but his sexual escapades on a yacht in the Gulf of Finland.²⁰ Brezhnev anyway punished him gently by sending him as Soviet ambassador to Beijing. Elsewhere in the RSFSR there was bureaucratic tranquillity. Typical province-level party secretaries were either left in post or else promoted to higher party and governmental offices. Cliental systems of personnel were fortified, and local officials built their ‘nests’ of interests so tightly that Central Committee emissaries could seldom unravel the local scams. Brezhnev sometimes talked about the need to ‘renew’ the cadres of party and government; but self-interest discouraged him from putting an end to the immobilism he detected. He did not want to risk alienating lower-level officialdom.

By the end of the 1960s Politburo members were united in their broad approach. They did not abandon Khrushchëv’s basic policies; but they erased his eccentricities and pencilled in what they thought to be sound alternatives. Stalin had been too brutal, Khrushchëv too erratic. They did not want to revert to the bloody fixities of the post-war years; they were glad that the unsettling reorganizations after 1953 had been terminated.

It was their assumption that such an approach would effect a successful stabilization of the Soviet order. They acted out of optimism, and still believed in the superiority of communism over its competitors. They could point to the military security and economic advance achieved since 1964. They were confident about having checked the rise of dissent and having brought the intelligentsia and the working class under control. They were not entirely hostile to experimentation in their measures at home and in Eastern Europe. But the scope for novelty was brusquely narrowed after the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. And already the Soviet leaders were becoming entangled in complications which they had not anticipated. They confronted deepening problems in politics, economics, society, culture, nationalism and international relations. Little did they know that the price of their attempt at stabilizing the Soviet order was about to be paid.