Utopia in Power

Few knew at that time, and few in the Soviet Union know even today, the full extent of military collaboration with the Germans by Soviet citizens. Many Soviet families lost members during the war; for this reason for a long time they considered those who fought on the German side to be traitors pure and simple. In 1945 people in the Soviet Union had other concerns. The masses had gone from a state of desperation in 1941 to a feeling of certain victory in 1943, to a feeling of pride over the total defeat of the despicable enemy in late 1944 and in 1945. Even if some might have wondered where the Vlasovites came from, what prompted them to turn traitor, they preferred to keep their thoughts to themselves. It was only after the 1955 amnesty, when the surviving Vlasovites returned to their homes, that they began to be regarded less harshly and some references appeared in Soviet literary works to the sad plight of the Soviet soldiers who were taken prisoner by the Germans, among them the Vlasovites. After the publication of the first volume of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, a polemic arose among the Soviet intelligentsia over the proper attitude to take toward Vlasov. The discussion continues to this day.

History willed, however, that Vlasov's troops should finally take part in the war not on the side of the Nazis but against them. Under the pressure of strategic circumstances, the First Division of the ROA, led by General Bunyachenko, and a unit that had joined it, led by Colonel Sakharov—a total of 20,000 troops—left Germany. On April 28 they entered Czecho­slovakia. There Bunyachenko refused to join the German army group led by Schorner: he wanted to safeguard his division for a future that did not seem very clear. The division dug in fifty kilometers from Prague. Vlasov was with it. By that time Soviet and American troops had also entered Czechoslovakia, but Prague was still in the hands of SS units. The Czech National Council placed its hopes on the arrival of the Allies. Unaware of an Allied agreement that Prague was to be occupied by Soviet troops, while the Americans would stop at a line west of Prague, the National Council called for an armed popular uprising.

On May 5 the SS units began an unrestrained massacre of the people of Prague, who had risen up against them. Seeing that no help was on the way, the Czech National Council asked Bunyachenko for assistance. On the morning of May 7, after bloody fighting, Bunyachenko's division de­feated the SS troops. But the Czechs then proposed that the ROA division either wait for the Red Army and surrender to it or abandon Prague. Bunyachenko chose the latter course: the division started its last march to surrender to American forces. One may agree with the American author who said that Prague would have been liberated in the following days, regardless of whether Vlasov's division took part in the fighting.¹⁵¹ It should be added, however, that this would have been done at the cost of Prague's destruction by the SS and the deaths of thousands of Czechs.

Toward the end of the war, Vlasov and his entourage increasingly hoped to see a conflict break out between the Western allies and the Soviet Union. That was why Bunyachenko tried to avoid the deployment of his division on the German side. He expected that the Allies would soon need his troops in a new war against the Stalinist regime. The Second Division also kept moving and avoided taking part in combat on the German side. The Prague uprising was an unexpected opportunity for the Vlasovites to cleanse their record of the blot of collaboration with the Nazis, and Bunyachenko seized that opportunity.

The Vlasovites were quickly disarmed by the Americans, and partly by Soviet troops. Some Vlasovite units managed to escape to the West, thanks in part to the assistance of certain U.S. army commanders.

The American command turned Vlasov over to the Soviets. On August 2, 1946, Pravda announced the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Soviet in the trial of Vlasov and others. The list of accusations was stereotypical: agents of German intelligence, espionage, diversionary activities, and terrorism against the Soviet Union. The Pravda announce­ment indicated that all the defendants had pleaded guilty. Petr Grigorenko in his memoirs states that he was told by a friend from before the war, a Soviet army officer who had been "planted" by the investigative agencies in a prison cell with one of the Vlasovite defendants, that "our one as­signment was to persuade Vlasov and his companions to confess to treason without saying anything against Stalin. For such a confession they were promised life. A few of them wavered, but most, including Vlasov and Trukhin, did not."¹⁵²

There were rumors that at least one of them, Major General Trukhin, refused to plead guilty and declared he had been and remained a confirmed anti-Stalinist. To all efforts at persuasion Trukhin replied that he had "not been a traitor and would not confess to treason. Stalin I hate. I consider him a tyrant and will say so in court." As for Vlasov, he responded to threats that he would be tortured to death as follows: "I know. And it frightens me. But it is even more frightening to blacken my own name. Anyhow, our sufferings will not be in vain. The time will come when the people will speak well of us." According to this account, there was no open trial. The defendants were tortured for a long time, then hanged when they were half dead.¹⁵³ In fact, it is impossible to determine whether there actually was a trial or if, at the end of the interrogations, the death sentences were simply read and carried out, as had often happened before.

All the accused were hanged: Bunyachenko was not saved by his rescue of Prague from the SS. On the contrary, it worked to his disadvantage, since his action deprived the Red Army of the glory of liberating the city. It is also true that this page of history was immediately rewritten in all Soviet and Eastern European histories and textbooks, which simply state that Prague was liberated by Soviet troops on May 9, 1945.

POTSDAM, THE WAR AGAINST JAPAN, AND THE BOMB

On July 17, two and a half months after the conclusion of the war in Europe, in Postdam, a suburb of the German capital, the last conference of heads of state of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States began its work. It lasted until August 2. Roosevelt, who had died in April, was replaced by his vice-president, Harry Truman. During the conference, changes also took place in the British government. Labour won in the general elections at the end of July and Churchill was replaced in the midst of the conference by Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour party. Ernest Bevin, the new British foreign minister, also appeared at the conference. Stalin was thus the only survivor of the wartime Big Three, which gave him specific moral and practical advantages in the Potsdam discussions. But the Soviet Union's biggest asset was the fact that during the course of the war it had become the principal force in the destruction of Nazi Germany. Soviet troops were throughout Europe. By the end of the war Soviet armed forces numbered 11 million.

The Allies were in agreement on the need to disband the Nazi party and to eliminate Germany's armed forces and military potential. Their policy toward the defeated country was expressed in the principles of demilitar­ization, denazification, decartelization, and democratization. Berlin and the rest of Germany were divided into occupation zones.

By the time of the conference the Soviet Union had already placed the German territories east of the Oder—Neisse line under Polish control. The Soviet position on this question prevailed after some dispute. Great Britain and the United States had no alternative but to acknowledge the fait ac­compli. From then on, Poland's western border was the Oder—Neisse line (that is, a line running south from the Baltic Sea along the Oder and Neisse rivers all the way to the Czechoslovak border). Konigsberg and its environs were given to the Soviet Union, as had been agreed at the Teheran con­ference. The Potsdam conference decided to prepare drafts of peace treaties with Germany's former satellites Finland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Italy. To this end a Council of Foreign Ministers was established on a permanent basis, consisting of the ministers of Britain, China, the Soviet Union, France, and the United States.

At Potsdam, the Soviet Union reaffirmed its promise to declare war on Japan.¹⁵⁴ Potsdam marked not only the end of the war in Europe but also the beginning of a new era for humanity, the atomic age. The first tests of the atomic bomb had taken place in the United States on the eve of the conference. Churchill and Truman were excited. According to Field Marshal Alanbrooke, Churchill

was already seeing himself capable of eliminating all the Russian centers of industry and population without taking into account any of the connected problems, such as delivery of the bomb, production of bombs, the possibility of Russians also possessing such bombs, etc. He had at once painted a wonderful picture of himself as the sole possessor of these bombs and capable of dumping them where he wished, thus all-powerful and capable of dictating to Stalin.¹⁵⁵

Both Truman and Churchill were surprised by Stalin's indifference toward the news of the detonation of an A-bomb. It was said that either he did not understand or he underestimated the importance of the new weapon. In reality, Stalin was fully aware of what had taken place but was clever enough to hide his feelings.

Two years before the tests in New Mexico, the Soviets had already begun to investigate thermonuclear reactions. At the end of 1942 Georgy Flerov, one of the most capable Soviet physicists, along with his colleague K. A. Petrzhak, had discovered the spontaneous disintegration of plutonium. He explained his findings in a letter to Abram Ioffe, the father of Soviet nuclear physics, and to the State Defense Committee, urging them to focus attention immediately on the problem of harnessing atomic energy and developing an atomic weapon. At more or less the same time another Soviet physicist, Igor Kurchatov, was summoned to Moscow to meet with a group preparing a report on the subject to the Central Committee. The report was given a favorable hearing, and a special bureau was established under Kurchatov. It was not until Stalin returned from Potsdam, however, that special attention was accorded to the atomic project. Beria, the head of state security, was placed in charge of the project, and enormous resources were allocated to it. Soviet intelligence was ordered to devote its efforts to obtaining atomic secrets, and it succeeded in obtaining a great deal. By December 1946 the first Soviet atomic reactor was built.

This example shows quite instructively how history works, how events in one field have an immediate effect on other fields. In Stalin's first postwar policy statement, made in connection with the elections to the Supreme Soviet on February 9, 1946, he stressed that it was essential to encourage scientific research.¹⁵⁶ Scientists' salaries were doubled or tripled, housing was built for them, and they were provided with better medical care than the rest of the population. It was at this point that the higher strata of the scientific community became an integral part of the top bureaucracy.

In April 1941 the Soviet Union had signed a neutrality pact with Japan. This pact served the Soviet Union well during the difficult first two years of war. Thanks to this pact, the Soviet command had been able to risk weakening the Far East and transfer significant military contingents west. The forty divisions stationed in the Far East were far from full strength. From many divisions entire regiments were transferred to the German front, leaving only their numbers as camouflage to confuse the command of the Japanese Kwantung army.

At the beginning of 1942 Japan had definitely abandoned all plans for war against the Soviet Union. After Germany's surrender the Japanese government sought several times to induce the Soviet Union to act as a mediator to end the war between Japan and the Western allies. One purpose of these overtures was to discourage Soviet entry into the war against Japan.

During the Potsdam conference the Japanese government offered to send Prince Konoye to Moscow to initiate talks. Stalin informed Truman and Churchill of the Japanese proposal, explaining that since the Japanese had not expressed willingness to surrender unconditionally, as the Allies in­sisted, the Soviet government had stated that it could not give a concrete reply to an inquiry made in such general terms.

At Potsdam Truman formally suggested that the Soviet government break its neutrality pact with Japan and enter the war against it, citing the Soviet

Union's obligations as a member of the United Nations. Both Truman and Stalin deliberately disregarded the fact that the UN charter had not yet been ratified; ratification came only on August 20, 1945, eleven days after the Soviet Union declared war on Japan.

But all these were mere legal arguments. Immediately after the end of the war with Germany, four Soviet armies had been hastily transferred to the Far East. Marshal Vassilevsky had been sent there as commander-in- chief, along with Marshals Malinovsky and Meretskov to direct operations. For Stalin, the question of war against Japan had long been decided. This issue had several aspects. On the military level, an offensive in the Far East and the destruction of the Japanese Kwantung army would give the Soviet Union the immense territory of Manchuria and enable it to establish strong points to the southeast of the existing Soviet borders. In the context of continuing civil war in China, the Soviet Union could become an influ­ential force on the continent of Asia, capable of intervening in the affairs of China, Indochina, and Korea. Furthermore, Stalin thought of himself with pride as the man who had regained the lost lands conquered by imperial Russia. From this point of view, to defeat Japan in the Far East would be to avenge the defeat of Russia in the war of 1904. In addition, by partic­ipating in the war against Japan, the Soviet Union would acquire the legal and moral right to have a voice in all matters involving the Pacific region.

By the end of July the Soviet command had concentrated 1,500,000 men in the Far East (to the Japanese 1,040,000), 26,000 guns (against 5,360 for the Japanese), 5,500 tanks (against 1,155), and 3,900 planes (against 1,800).¹⁵⁷ Soviet superiority was overwhelming, and the Soviets planned to break Japanese resistance in a very short time, before Japan's capitulation to the United States.

On August 6, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiro­shima. Japan offered to surrender on the one condition that the rights of the emperor be respected. Demanding an unconditional surrender, the United States dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki. When news reached Moscow of the frightening consequences of the first bomb, the Soviet gov­ernment, not wanting to be late to the "feast of the victors," declared war on Japan. This was officially announced on August 8. The next day the Soviet offensive in Manchuria began.

On August 14 Japan surrendered, in utter shock from the effects of the atomic blasts. Later, Soviet official historiography would say that the sur­render was the result of the offensive in Manchuria. In reality, military operations in Manchuria continued until August 19—that is, five days after the unconditional Japanese surrender—when the commander of the Kwan­tung army, General Yamada, signed a statement of capitulation at Marshal

Vassilevsky's headquarters. The Soviet troops continued their offensive nevertheless, hoping to take as much Manchurian territory as possible and occupy all key points in Manchuria. The troops of the First Far Eastern Front entered Korea and reached the thirty-eighth parallel, the demarcation line agreed on by the American and Soviet armies.

On August 20, the troops of the Trans-Baikal Front occupied Port Arthur and reached the sea between Peking and Mukden. Troops of the Second Far Eastern Front occupied the southern part of Sakhalin Island and also the Kurile islands.

On August 23, the war in the Far East ended.

According to Soviet figures, some 84,000 Japanese troops were killed in these operations. (Japanese sources indicate a figure four times smaller— 21,000.) Approximately 600,000 Japanese were captured, including 148 generals. Red Army losses, according to Soviet sources, were insignificant: 32,000 dead and wounded.¹⁵⁸

On August 14, the day of Japan's surrender, at the height of the Soviet offensive in Manchuria, a Sino—Soviet friendship treaty and other supple­mentary pacts were signed. One of these turned Port Arthur into a Soviet naval base, although formal civil administration remained in the hands of the Chinese. Port Dalny (Dairen) became a "free city," with a special zone for Soviet piers and depots. An agreement was also signed for joint utili­zation of the Chinese Eastern Railway. All these agreements were concluded for a thirty-year period. China agreed to recognize the independence of the People's Republic of Mongolia after a plebiscite, which was to be orga­nized. ¹⁵⁹ Through the war the Soviet Union was able to realize its military and political designs in the Far East to the fullest.

On September 2, the commander-in-chief of Allied troops in the Pacific theater, General Douglas MacArthur, accepted Japan's formal surrender aboard the aircraft carrier USS Missouri.

September 3, the day of victory against Japan, was declared an official holiday in the Soviet Union.

World War II had ended.

THE BALANCE SHEET

With the war over, the situation in the world changed radically. Millions of Allied soldiers had inundated Europe, but demobilization had begun and thousands were returning home. It was a happy time as families were reunited. A time of joy, a time of sorrow. A time of grief and remembrance. A time of hope and rebirth. A time to give life to new generations. In the

Soviet Union there was scarcely a family that had not lost someone in the war.

Of all the participants in World War II, the Soviet Union suffered the greatest losses. Figures differ on how great those losses were. According to Soviet sources, they amounted to 10 million soldiers and an equal number of civilians, a total of 20 million people.¹⁶⁰ In 1973, the figures were given for the Russian Republic (RSFSR), the Ukrainian SSR, the Byelorussian SSR, and the Karelo-Finish SSR. Under the rubric "killed and tortured to death," 6,844,551 civilian casualties were cited, along with 3,932,256 prisoners of war.¹⁶¹ The figures for the republics of Transcaucasia, Ka­zakhstan, and Central Asia remain unknown. Western historians have pro­duced slightly different figures: 13,600,000 Soviet soldiers killed and 7,700,000 civilian casualties, a total of 21,300,000 victims, or 11 percent of the Soviet population in 1941.

In the six-year war, from 1939 to 1945, Germany lost 3,250,000 soldiers and 3,810,000 civilians, a third of the losses of the Soviet Union. In the same period Great Britain and the Commonwealth lost 452,000 soldiers and 60,000 civilians, or forty-two times less than the Soviet Union. Between December 1941 and September 1945 the United States lost 295,000 men, seventy-two times less than the Soviet Union. Poland suffered very heavy losses: 5,300,000 people (mainly Jews) exterminated in the Nazi death camps, and 120,000 soldiers killed. These losses amounted to 20 percent of Poland's prewar population. Yugoslavia lost 1,300,000 civilians and 300,000 soldiers. The countries of the antifascist coalition lost 18,587,000 soldiers and 25,140,000 civilians, for a total of 43,727,000 people. The countries of the fascist bloc lost only one-fourth as many: 5,930,000 soldiers and 5,087,000 civilians, a total of 11,017,000.

The total number of deaths in World War II was 55,014,000, or 6.4 times the number of World War I (8,634,000).¹⁶² Military actions had brought ruin to many European countries.

The Soviet losses amounted to 38 percent of the total losses in World War II.

For one thing, the war was fought on Soviet territory for three and a half years. The Nazis sought the physical eradication of the Russians and many other nationalities of the USSR. In addition to those killed in military operations, many Soviet citizens were exterminated in mass executions, in prisoner of war camps, as well as in the Nazi death camps. On the other hand, the unprecedented Soviet losses were also a direct result of criminal negligence on the part of the leadership, Stalin and the members of the Politburo, the Central Committee, and the government, in failing to prepare adequately for war. The policy of entente with Nazi Germany, from 1939

to 1941, also had extremely grave consequences. The elimination during the years of terror of almost all the upper echelons of the military command left the Soviet army in the hands of officers whose knowledge and military experience dated from World War I and the Russian civil war or who had been hastily trained and lacked experience.

In spite of its demagogic slogan, "People are the most valuable capital," the Soviet government showed total disregard for human life.

The Soviet command often sought to win a battle at any cost, rather than to win it without suffering unnecessary losses. The history of the Soviet- German war offers numerous examples of soldiers openly sent to their slaughter by order of the high command, of men killed because of the vanity and carelessness of their superiors, of ill-prepared offensives that lacked the necessary logistical support and ended in retreats and enormous losses. Even experienced commanders like Zhukov, Vassilevsky, Kirponos, Timoshenko, and Meretskov lacked the courage to oppose the adventuristic and erroneous orders of the supreme commander-in-chief, Generalissimo Stalin.

In the most difficult and dangerous sectors of the front, penal battalions were used. It was here that, according to the official account, military personnel served sentences for criminal or military offenses.¹⁶³ However, it was easy to end up in a penal battalion because of an incautious word, criticism of the actions of the command, or a joke. Those in penal battalions were stripped of their military ranks and decorations. Few of the great number who served in penal units survived. How many perished? The official statistics are silent about this, but it is certainly a matter of many thousands.

During the war Stalin, with the knowledge and blessing of the Politburo, ordered the deportation to Siberia of tens of thousands of inhabitants of the annexed territories, many of whom died of hunger and disease. Over 1 million people were deported from the Crimea and the Caucasus in 1943 and 1944. Tens of thousands of lives were lost as a result. No one knows the number of victims arrested by the state security agencies as "enemies of the people" or "German spies"—except of course those agencies them­selves. It is very likely that the vast majority of those arrested were not guilty of such offenses. But the work of the security police was judged in terms of the number of "hostile agents" rendered harmless, and the number was constantly increased. Thousands of Soviet soldiers who had the mis­fortune of becoming prisoners of the Germans but who miraculously survived turned up later in Soviet correction camps as traitors to the homeland.

For this reason, blame for the losses suffered by the Soviet people belongs not only to the Nazis and their satellites and collaborators and to the hazards of war. The Soviet leaders were also to blame, but not one of them was ever tried for these crimes.

Examples of heroism on the part of Soviet soldiers are numerous. In his unpublished memoirs, Colonel Novobranets describes the fierce hand-to- hand night combat the men of the Soviet Sixth Army engaged in as they broke out of encirclement in the first weeks of the war. In the border regions, the border guard units and the regular army troops that took part in the initial battles of the German invasion fought desperately. The resis­tance by the garrison of the Brest fortress was heroic, despite the fact that the command had abandoned it. The fortress was besieged on all sides by the Germans but continued to resist for twenty-eight days. The few sur­vivors, after unprecedented suffering at the hands of the Germans, ended up in Soviet prison camp in Kolyma as "traitors to the homeland." They were not rehabilitated until many years after the war.

There were also many cases in which Soviet pilots flew directly into enemy targets. When captured by the Germans, partisans also bore them­selves courageously. As a rule, they were executed after terrible torture. Such was the fate of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a female partisan fighter captured by the Germans near Moscow. General Karbyshev refused to join the Germans and was transformed into an ice block, frozen alive in the Mauthausen camp.

As in any event of these dimensions, the war gave birth to myths and legends whereby soldiers were endowed with miraculous strength. Words were attributed to them which later became part of the history of the war. Such mythology is inevitable and has always been part of wars. For example, many Soviet books on the war attribute the following words to the political officer Klochkov, who allegedly said to a handful of soldiers of General Panfilov's division, near Moscow: "Russia is huge, but we cannot retreat any further, for behind us is Moscow." Who could have reported these words, when Klochkov and all his men but one were killed, and the one survivor was mortally wounded and unable to speak coherently? A journalist named Aleksandr Krivitsky took this mission upon himself; he was the first to write about the heroic feat of Klochkov and the other "Panfilov men." Asked by Shcherbakov, director of the Red Army's Main Political Direc­torate, how he knew Klochkov had said those words, Krivitsky replied, 'That's what he must have said."

The Soviet victory in the war was not the result of Stalin's wise and infallible leadership, nor that of the State Defense Committee and the high command. The Soviet Union won the war despite the party leadership's colossal errors, through the combined efforts of the people, the army, and those same leaders.

Before the war the adventuristic and dangerous policies of the gov­ernment led to the creation of a common border between the Soviet Union and the principal military force in Europe, Nazi Germany. The dismantling of the pre-1939 border defenses and the absence of adequate fortifications at the new border gave the enemy a considerable advantage at the beginning of the war and permitted enormous gains in time and territory. These mistakes alone (not to mention the senseless orders for offensive operations in the first days of the war, which resulted in the encirclement and ruin of entire armies) caused incalculable damage to the Soviet war effort. During the first days of the war, the Soviet Union lost a territory equal in size to the parts of Western Europe occupied by Germany in 1939—1940. Only the vastness of Soviet territory and the existence of a very distant rear area with an industrial base rich in raw materials (the Urals, Siberia, Transcaucasia, and the Far East), together with Hitler's political and strategic blunders, saved the Soviet Union from total defeat in 1941. In spite of everything, its resources sufficed finally to exceed Germany's strength, both in numbers of divisions and in volume of military production. If the Soviet Union had been the size of France or Germany, the mistakes of the Communist party and its leaders would have brought the country to defeat. It suffices to recall that during the first three weeks of the war, the German armies advanced faster into Soviet territory than they had into Poland.

For example, this is what Artillery Chief Marshal Nikolai Voronov wrote:

If the fascist invaders, who treacherously attacked us at dawn on June 22, 1941, had met an organized resistance on the part of our troops, starting from lines of defense prepared in advance, if our aircraft, moved in time and dispersed to forward airfields, had dealt hard blows to the enemy, if the manner of advancing our troops had corresponded to the situation, during the initial months we would not have suffered such great human and material losses. We would not have given the enemy vast amounts of Soviet territory, and the people would not have had to endure such sufferings and ordeals.¹⁶⁴

Another military leader, Marshal Grechko, wrote: "Sadly, it must be admitted that one of the chief causes of the setbacks at the beginning of the war had its roots in the errors of the top military leadership."¹⁶⁵

In 1941 the Soviet armies had vast territories behind them and they were able to withdraw to Leningrad in the northwest, Moscow in the west, and Rostov-on-the-Don and the Crimea in the south. In 1942 they also had room for withdrawal and retreated to Stalingrad and the Greater Caucasus Range.

Stalin's famous order No. 227, known as the Not One Step Back order, denounced the apparently widespread idea that it was always possible to retreat farther. But this idea reflected an objective reality: the immensity of Soviet territory, which allowed it time to prepare a counteroffensive. The fact of so much territory in reserve compensated to a certain degree for the mistakes of the Communist party politicians and the military leadership.

The Soviet Union had a stable rear, solidified, on the one hand, by the patriotism of the people and, on the other, by the cruelty of the Germans who left the population no other choice but to fight to the end. The Soviet system proved solid enough to withstand the terrible blow dealt by Hitler's Germany. Aid from the United States and Britain also played a major role.

The experiences of the war demonstrated that totalitarian regimes, which base themselves on unlimited violence, imposing a state of constant fear and an ideology of moral or racial superiority, have a certain stability. It took the combined efforts of the states of the anti-Hitler coalition and the occupation of the capital of the Reich through the fierce struggle of the Soviet armed forces to smash the Nazi system. Also necessary was a military program unifying the members of the coalition, a program which had at its base the ideals of liberty and democracy. The Nazi regime put up a desperate resistance until it was physically destroyed. In carrying the fight through to the end, the Soviet Union and its allies showed a tremendous will to achieve victory.

For a quarter of a century, with the exception of the brief NEP interim, before collectivization, the Soviet population had known very difficult times. It had grown used to privations, malnutrition, lack of sleep, and poor housing. For this reason, it was able to endure wartime hardship that people of Western culture would probably have been unable to endure.

The Soviet leadership was able to recover after the initial blows of the enemy. The Soviet Communist party, having at its disposal devoted and loyal political cadres, a powerful state security organization, and years of experience in subjugating and governing the masses, soon reestablished its control everywhere it had been lost or weakened. Identifying its interests with those of the people, it led and took the credit for the upsurge of patriotism.

The government even succeeded in presenting its mistakes and crimes as proofs of foresight and as correct defensive measures. For example, the terror of the 1930s, which had eliminated the most competent military commanders, industrial leaders, and so forth, was portrayed as the timely destruction of a "fifth column," of "German spies" and "enemies of the people." This explanation was taken up enthusiastically by the Communist parties abroad and circulated by the liberal antifascist intelligentsia in the

West. The disorganized retreats and defeats of 1941 and 1942 were por­trayed as a wise strategy of "mobile defense" and the like.

For a long time victory overshadowed the privations, difficulties, and pain. Soldiers returned to their homes with hope for improvement in their lives. The war was over. But nostalgia for the past, and regret over the unrealized dreams of German—Soviet hegemony in Europe, haunted Stalin for years to come.

Even at the height of the war, five months after the German invasion, on November 6, 1941, Stalin still sought to justify his policy of 1939— 1941. He still described the Nazis with sneaking sympathy. "As long as the Hitlerites were engaged in the recovery of German lands, reuniting the Rhineland, Austria, etc., with Germany, they could be considered nation­alists with some justification."¹⁶⁶ This was a strange pronouncement coming from a man who claimed to be the main theoretician of "proletarian inter­nationalism." It sounded like understanding, if not approval, of the Nazis⁹ actions. In fact, Stalin himself recovered some former lands of the Romanov empire with Hitler's assistance—the Baltic states, western Byelorussia, and the western Ukraine—at the time acquiring some "lands" formerly belonging to the Habsburg monarchy—Northern Bukovina and the Trans- carpathian Ukraine.

Stalin also struck a nostalgic note in a completely different historical context. In a telegram congratulating Pieck and Grotewohl, on October 13, 1949, on the occasion of the founding of the German Democratic Republic, he wrote: 'The experience of the last war has shown that the greatest sacrifices were borne by the German and Soviet peoples, and that, in Europe, these two peoples have the greatest potential for carrying out major actions of worldwide significance" (emphasis added—A. N.).¹⁶⁷

Woe unto the other European peoples, who did not have such great potential!

Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, has made clear what Stalin meant by "actions of worldwide significance."

He had not guessed or foreseen that the pact of 1939, which he had con­sidered the outcome of his own great cunning, would be broken by an enemy more cunning than himself. This was the real reason for his deep depression at the start of the war. It was his immense political miscalculation. Even after the war was over he was in the habit of repeating, "Ech, together with the Germans we would have been invincible!" But he never admitted his mistakes. (Emphasis added—A.N.)¹⁶⁸

Stalin nevertheless did learn a few lessons from his mistakes. The main practical conclusion, which he drew after the war, was to avoid sharing a common border with Germany. In 1941, a common border had left the Soviet Union open to German attack on a large front. After World War II, Stalin reverted to the idea of a cordon sanitaire, in a unique and modified form. This time, instead of the prewar cordon, a buffer zone of "fraternal socialist countries" separated the Soviet Union from Germany. Most likely Stalin thought that Germany would eventually reunite. Thus he returned to an ancient geopolitical concept: do not share a border with a powerful neighbor.

Twenty million human lives—such was the cost of Stalin's miscal­culation.

THE TWILIGHT OF THE STALIN ERA, 1945-1953

REPATRIATION

The war was over. Troop trains full of demobilized Soviet soldiers headed east from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Bul­garia. Soviet civilians came out to meet them at all the railroad stations wearing their best clothes, which had somehow been preserved despite the war and were often in tatters. Those who had taken Berlin and Budapest danced gallantly on the platforms, dragging out their war booty accordions.

CHAPTER

There were other troop trains heading east as well, but these had sealed doors and barred windows. They too carried Soviet soldiers, but no music or singing came from these tightly locked cattlecars. No one met them at railroad stations. These trains kept traveling day and night. There were also troop ships that pulled up to deserted wharfs to unload former Soviet prisoners of war returning from the Nazi camps. They touched foot on their native soil under heavy guard. Also being returned were those who willingly or otherwise had aided the Germans or had worked for them. Among them were some who had never lived in postrevolutionary Russia but whom the British, American, or French allies had considered Soviet citizens. They were turned over to the Soviet government, to deal with as it saw fit, without trial of any kind.

At the end of the war more than 5 million Soviet citizens were in Germany and other countries of Western Europe, including former prisoners of war, workers and peasants who had been transported to Germany for forced labor (the so-called Ostarbeiter), and people who had left the Soviet Union at the time of the German retreat.

Under the Yalta agreement, Soviet citizens wishing to return to their homeland were to be repatriated. The agreement also provided for forced repatriation; it extended to those wearing German uniforms at the time of capture and to those who had belonged to the Soviet armed forces after June 22, 1941, had not been released from their duties, and on the basis of reliable information were thought to have collaborated with the enemy.¹ In practice this agreement opened the way for forcible repatriation of any­one, indiscriminately, without distinction, even including people who were not Soviet citizens.

First the British government and then the United States responded in a most obliging way to the Soviet government's intention to regain as its subjects all who had turned up in the West during the war, regardless of their personal desires.² The Soviet government was anxious not only to prevent the formation of a new political emigration in the West but also to disrupt or destroy the old emigr6 community.

The forced repatriation began soon after the end of the war and was largely completed by 1947. Some of the former Soviet prisoners of war, delivered to the ports of Murmansk and Odessa by British ships, were shot by NKVD troops right on the docks where they were landed. Among those being forcibly repatriated many attempted suicide. The Soviet officers in charge of this operation did not hide from their British counterparts that death awaited many upon their return to the Soviet Union.³

The British authorities also delivered former White emigr6s who had never been Soviet citizens. Even the NKVD officers receiving the repatriots, who had seen much in their lives, were amazed at this unexpected gift from the British. Merkulov, the Soviet minister of state security, said the following of the British: 'They don't even know that we have them trapped in a corner on a chess board and now we'll make them dance to our tune like the last pawn on the board."⁴

In Paris the NKVD conducted virtually a public manhunt for Soviet citizens who did not want to return to the USSR.⁵ In the Beauregard detention camp, where those subject to repatriation were held, the Soviet authorities behaved just as they did in the concentration camps on Soviet territory. It was only two years after the war, in 1947, that under the pressure of public opinion the French police raided the Beauregard camp and found stores of weapons. Only then was the camp closed.⁶

Altogether 2,272,000 Soviet citizens—prisoners of war and those of "equivalent status"—were repatriated to the Soviet Union with the help of the British and American authorities. What was their fate? The overwhelm­ing majority were accused of treason. They were not tried individually. Special three-men boards (troikas) handed down group sentences. Twenty percent were given death sentences or twenty-five years in camps; 15—20 percent were condemned to terms between five and ten years; 10 percent were exiled to remote parts of Siberia for periods of no less than six years; 15 percent were assigned to forced labor detachments rebuilding areas destroyed by the war; and only 15—20 percent were allowed to return to their homes. Of the 15—20 percent remaining, some were undoubtedly killed or died in passage and some escaped.⁷ The Allied governments knew that many of the forced repatriates faced certain death, but those govern­ments were not particularly concerned, guided as they were by pragmatic considerations and the wish to assure themselves of Soviet cooperation in the postwar world.

The forced repatriation of non-Soviet citizens who had been born in prerevolutionary Russia helped to intimidate many Soviet citizens who wished to settle in the West.

Even after the war the Allied military administration continued to return Red Army personnel who fled to Western occupation zones in Germany. However, despite all obstacles, between 13,000 and 14,000 Soviet citizens fled to the West during the first four postwar years.⁸ Only in 1951 did the United States officially change its policy and grant the right of asylum to refugees from the Soviet Union. The Soviet government never released the official data on the number of defectors. In individual cases Soviet prop­aganda denounced them as spies or hirelings of imperialism. The horrors of the Nazi camps—where up to 11 million people were killed during World War II—had provoked such a wave of legitimate rage that no one even wanted to give a serious thought to the victims of the other totalitarian regime, the war's victor.

In addition to former prisoners of war and those of "equivalent status," there were 3.2 million Soviet citizens in Western Europe after the war. Almost all of them returned to the Soviet Union or were forcibly repatriated. According to an official report of the Soviet Central Administration for Repatriation Affairs, as of January 1, 1953, the number of Soviet citizens who had returned to their homeland was 5,457,856. As of the same date, 4,059,736 foreign citizens had been returned to their countries from the Soviet Union, including former prisoners of war from the countries that had been defeated in the war.⁹

THE INSURRECTIONAL MOVEMENT

The war was over, but not for everyone. Insurrectional movements in op­position to Soviet rule continued in the western Ukraine and the Baltic nations, the result of strong aspirations for independence and a reaction against the Soviet purges of 1939—1941, collectivization, and the danger of new deportations.

In 1939 a purge had taken place in the western Ukraine after it was annexed. All opponents or suspected opponents of the Soviet government had been arrested and deported to the eastern parts of the Soviet Union. Some were shot. Ukrainian and Polish organizations and institutions had been banned, but at the same time the schools had been completely "Ukrainized." Legal Ukrainian parties ceased to exist. The Uniate church was spared in 1939—1941, but priests were given special passports and churches became subject to heavy taxation.¹⁰

At the time of the Red Army's retreat in 1941, mass arrests were carried out among the western Ukrainian population. In the majority of prisons, NKVD troops shot all inmates who had been sentenced to more than three years. In some towns the NKVD burned prisons with all their inmates. According to Ukrainian sources, 10,000 prisoners were shot in Lvov, Zolochevo, Rovno, Dubno, Lutsk, and other cities.¹¹

During the brief Soviet period in the territory, from 1939 to 1941, a relatively powerful underground organization, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) had survived. After the arrival of the Germans in the Ukraine, the OUN leaders attempted to set up independent Ukrainian governments in Lvov and Kiev, but these bodies were dispersed by the Germans and their leaders jailed.¹² Many Ukrainian nationalists sought to collaborate with the Germans. Some joined SS units (such as the Galichina division); others fought the Red Army and helped the Germans hunt down Communists and Jews. Once it became evident that the German authorities did not have the slightest intention of allowing the formation of an inde­pendent Ukrainian state, the OUN declared war on two fronts: "against Stalin and against Hitler." Their main efforts, however, were directed as before against the Red Army.

In July 1944, when the Red Army entered the western Ukraine, the OUN set up a Supreme Council for the Liberation of the Ukraine. OUN leader Roman Shukhevich became the commander of the Ukrainian In­surgent Army (UPA), under the pseudonym General Taras Chuprinka (nick­named "Tur").

The chiefs of the OUN hoped for the weakening of both Germany and the Soviet Union and expected that Britain—especially since Churchill was prime minister—would actively oppose the hegemonic designs of the USSR in Europe. They foresaw a general popular insurrection, which would be supported by the peoples of the other territories occupied by the Red Army. But this proved an empty dream. The OUN had to confine its military operations to those of its own forces. Its main objective was to defend the western Ukrainian population from the threat of a new wave of terror and mass deportations. In the western Ukrainian rural areas the population supported the UPA, allowing it to wage an armed struggle even for many years after the end of World War II.

When the Red Army entered the territory of the western Ukraine, the Soviet command and the government of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic called on the insurgents to lay down their arms, promising an amnesty. This appeal brought no tangible results. From 1944 to 1947 there were six such offers, extending the period of amnesty further each time.¹³ In 1945 the principal agricultural regions of the western Ukraine, deep in the country, were controlled by the insurgents. In February 1946 the ma­jority of the population boycotted the first elections to the Supreme Soviet, while official communiqu6s stated, as usual, that the population had voted "unanimously" for the only candidates.

The OUN program underwent major changes with the years. In 1950 the OUN called for the total dissolution of the kolkhozes but opposed a return of the landowners and capitalists. It advocated that the land be freely turned over to the peasants and become family property. The OUN also called for freedom for social and political organizations. According to Ukrainian sources, the ideology of the OUN was gradually evolving toward liberal democracy.

Besides waging an armed struggle, the insurgents widely disseminated leaflets, even organizing propaganda raids into Slovakia, the eastern part of Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Romania. While pitilessly killing every NKVD officer or soldier and every party or Soviet activist who fell into their hands, the insurgents sometimes spared regular army soldiers, feeding them and giving them OUN literature. Such instances, however, were not numerous. Cruelty was the rule on both sides. The UPA, which was fighting for independence, attacked the Poles, killing 3,000 of them in the Ukraine, and likewise attacked the Jews. The UPA theater of operations spread through Poland (beyond the Curzon line) and Czechoslovakia (in the moun­tains of Slovakia).

After the German defeat, UPA detachments were divided into smaller units, which also made forays into the eastern Ukraine. Soviet sources are silent about the strength of the insurgents. According to Polish sources, as many as 6,000 insurgents operated in Polish territory alone, in the zone immediately adjacent to the Soviet border. Ukrainian sources claim that UPA forces had attained 20,000 fighters in the fall of 1944, that is, when the Soviet troops entered the western Ukraine.¹⁴ The magnitude of the movement may be judged by the fact that the local population generally aided the insurgents and that in May 1947 an agreement was signed between the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia for joint military action against the Ukrainian insurgents, who naturally were labeled bandits.

In June 1945 three Polish divisions were deployed against the insurgents, but the results were minimal. In an effort to separate the insurgents from their base of support, the Polish government relocated its Ukrainian pop­ulation to the northwest of Poland. Polish sources noted that the Ukrainian rebellion was not defeated until the insurgents were physically crushed and the Ukrainian population deported.¹⁵

The 1947—48 famine forced tens of thousands of peasants in the eastern Ukraine to flee to the western part, where they became a reserve force for the insurgent movement.

All means were used against the insurgents—military operations, mass deportations to Siberia, relocation of entire villages from areas controlled by the insurgents to eastern regions of the Ukraine, and collectivization of the land. Ukrainian educators were sent from the eastern Ukraine to "re­educate" the population in the western part, and the Uniate church was banned.

The technique used to accomplish this last measure should be examined more closely. After the death of Metropolitan Shcheptitsky, head of the Uniate church in the western Ukraine, in November 1944, this church was invited to fuse with the Orthodox church. An intensive press campaign against the Uniates ensued. A resolute man, the new Metropolitan Slipoy was arrested along with his bishops and sentenced for allegedly collabo­rating with the Nazis during the war. Slowly, using various methods, in­cluding the murder of Bishop Romsha of Transcarpathia in 1951,¹⁶ the Uniate church was virtually destroyed, and its legal existence came to an end.

This was a major blow to the Ukrainian nationalists, but not a fatal one. The tenacity of the western Ukrainian movement can be judged by a doc­ument of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, Order No. 312, dated December 30, 1949, which again announced an amnesty for all those who voluntarily laid down their arms. This order also gives us an idea of the

social composition of the insurrection movement because it includes among the other categories of "bandits" youths who had fled the factories, the Donets mines, and vocational schools.¹⁷ The armed struggle, on a smaller scale than before, continued during the first half of the 1950s.

From 1946 to 1950, some 300,000 people were deported, exiled, or arrested in the western Ukraine. Included in this figure are former collab­orators with the German SS, former members of the Galichina SS division, among them criminals who had committed many murders and taken part in the mass execution of Jews in the Ukraine. But most of the deported were innocent peasants. The western Ukraine underwent collectivization and forced industrialization, which required the massive shipment into the area of specialists from the eastern Ukraine and Russia. The composition of the population changed and the rebellion withered away. Some nationalist leaders like Shukhevich died in the struggle; others like Okhrimovich were captured and executed. The final blows to the OUN came with the assas­sination by Soviet agents of Lev Rebet in 1957 and Stepan Bandera in 1959. Both were then living in West Germany.

Thus the period of armed struggle by Ukrainian nationalists came to an end. A new stage would unfold in the post-Stalin era—the peaceful struggle of the Ukrainian intelligentsia for their right to a national culture.

THE COLD WAR AT HOME AND ABROAD

After the war the international position of the Soviet Union changed rad­ically. Soviet troops were in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, in the northeast of China, on the Kurile islands, and on the island of Sakhalin.

The allies of the Soviet Union from the days of the anti-Hitler coalition silently accepted these changes because they were powerless to impede them. Ill-prepared for peace, they suffered an unprecedented, major defeat on the international arena. At that point, Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary entered the Soviet sphere of interest. The Soviet Union also had great influence in the Balkans, in Yugoslavia and Albania. It had troops in Vienna and Berlin. Communism was making great strides everywhere in Europe. Greece was plunged into civil war. The local Communist parties were growing in France and Italy.

In Asia powerful independence movements were developing in Indochina, Korea, Burma, the Philippines, Indonesia, and India. In China a civil war was underway in which the Communists had the clear ad-

vantage. The Soviet Union had never before been so popular in the East.

Everything seemed to favor the USSR. Of the six major Western powers before the war, only two maintained their positions: Great Britain, albeit badly shaken, having witnessed the collapse of its colonial empire and entered a period of cardinal change in world status; and the United States, which had emerged from the war powerful as never before.

During World War II the United States became aware of the full extent of its interdependence with Europe. Seeking to help the European states overcome their financial straits as quickly as possible, so that they could oppose the advance of communism, the Americans offered economic as­sistance for reconstruction—the Marshall Plan.¹⁸ American leaders also announced their intention to oppose the further spread of communism (the Truman Doctrine).¹⁹ The U.S. government proposed that the Soviet Union and other Eastern European states participate in the reconstruction plans, but the former and, under its pressure the latter, too, rejected the offer.²⁰

The Soviet government had no desire whatsoever to join with those nations in efforts toward a speedy recovery of the world economy. It wanted to create its own political and economic sphere, independent of the West, whose center would be the Soviet Union, surrounded by satellite states. In fact, during the first years after the war, the economies of these countries became increasingly dependent on the Soviet Union, tending to become only auxiliary.

It was expected that another means for reviving and strengthening the Soviet economy would be the reparations to be paid by the defeated nations and the industrial machinery transferred from those countries to the USSR as "spoils of war." However, because of inefficiency and mismanagement Soviet industry was unable to use a major part of this equipment, which simply sat and rusted.

In 1947 peace treaties were signed with Germany's former European allies, Italy in particular.²¹ The Soviet Union attempted to obtain a trust­eeship over Libya, a former Italian colony, thereby causing great commotion in the West.²² Seeking to gain a foothold in Africa and the Middle East, it recognized the state of Israel, founded in 1948.²³ But the USSR's first attempt to establish itself in the Middle East was thwarted by the Western powers, and the Soviet Union focused all its attention on Eastern Europe.

Soviet policy sought to make satellites of the Eastern European countries, recently liberated from the Germans. It was a simple, even primitive policy, but it was effective. Relying on the Soviet divisions that controlled the territories of those states, the Communist parties, which initially had taken part in coalitions of democratic antifascist parties, led military coups and came to power in each one of these countries. The technique was always the same, with only slight variations. During the first three or four years after the war, the bloc of Communist states of Eastern and Southeastern Europe took shape. These regimes called themselves people's democracies. A world socialist system was born.

In October 1949 the German Democratic Republic was proclaimed.²⁴ That same year, the Chinese Communists came to power after many years of civil war, establishing the People's Republic of China. The Communist victory in China was not a source of great joy for Stalin, as was erroneously assumed in the West. Secretary of State Dean Rusk declared, for example, that China had become a "Slavic Manchukuo," a Soviet colony.²⁵ Such superficial statements, the result of appraising the policies of these states on the basis of their common ideology, were typical of both sides in that era.

In place of a divided China, torn by civil war, the USSR witnessed the birth on its borders of an enormous, centralized Chinese state, with a population greater than three times its own. To stress its position as the "older brother" and Stalin's position as Mao's senior in the international Communist movement, Stalin made Mao wait several days before receiving him during his visit to Moscow in 1950. On the other hand, the victory of communism in China confirmed to Stalin the value of one of Lenin's pos­tulates—that the capitalist world would steadily shrink.

The newly created socialist states wanted to be independent. Some of their leaders attempted to escape from subjection to Moscow and the ne­cessity always to act in accordance with Soviet interests. This happened in the case of Tito, who had seemed likely to be Stalin's strongest ally.²⁶ Tito was secretly supported by Georgy Dimitrov, the former Comintern general secretary.²⁷

Stalin threatened to destroy Tito,²⁸ and he excommunicated the heretic by expelling the Yugoslav Communist party from the Cominform, the new international Communist organization that was founded in 1946,²⁹ replacing the Comintern, which had been dissolved in 1943. These measures did not break the Yugoslavs. The disintegration of the socialist system started at the same time it was born: a fact of major historical importance. It proved that the so-called socialist camp was not in fact a voluntary association of states sharing a uniform social system and ideology, but a forced agglom­eration of totalitarian states with socialist characteristics.

Lenin's dictum, "We seek a voluntary union of nations, a union which does not admit any coercion by one nation against another, a union based on total trust, the clear understanding of fraternal unity, a perfectly voluntary pact,"³⁰ twenty-five years later sounded exceedingly cynical.

• • •

On March 5, 1946, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave a speech at Fulton, Missouri, with President Harry S. Truman in attendance. Churchill noted with alarm an indisputable fact: an iron curtain had been lowered from the Baltic to the Adriatic.³¹ A furious arms race began, and the danger of atomic war became a central fact of life in the modern world. Since then each side has sought to maintain military su­periority, so that attempts at arms limitation or a ban on nuclear weapons have constantly been forced into dead ends or been blocked by insur­mountable technical and political difficulties.

The Soviet Union mobilized its enormous resources to develop first the atomic bomb and then the hydrogen bomb. It soon caught up with the United States as far as nuclear weapons were concerned.

The arms race, the divergence of opinion over virtually all major ques­tions of international relations, the "anticosmopolitan" campaign in the USSR and anticommunist hysteria in the United States, poisoned the in­ternational atmosphere, creating tense and dangerous situations and setting the stage for armed confrontation.

In April 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was born. This military bloc consisted of the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, Ice­land, and Luxembourg. Later, in 1952, Greece and Turkey joined, and in 1955 the Federal Republic of Germany.

The creation of NATO was in large part the result of the threat of Soviet military action against Turkey and Iran. After the war the Soviet Union launched a campaign against Turkey, demanded a renegotiation of the Montreux pact on the Straits and the return to Soviet Georgia and Armenia of lands annexed by Turkey following World War I.³² Military hysteria was on the rise in Armenia and Georgia.

In Iran, the Soviet Union refused to withdraw the troops it had sent there in 1941, under an agreement with Britain against the German threat. It also supported Azerbaijani separatists in northern Iran, who had rebelled against the central government.³³

In Europe, the Soviet government started a crisis over Berlin when, in violation of international agreements, it attempted to block access to the city by the Western powers.³⁴ The United States, however, successfully carried out the Berlin airlift, breaking the blockade and forcing the Soviet Union to back down.

Nevertheless, in all the cases just mentioned, the USSR and the United

States had enough sense to keep the conflict from becoming a "hot war," although at times it seemed as if peace hung only by a thread. The danger of another world war was especially great during the Berlin crisis, and again during the Korean war.

One of the consequences of the Japanese defeat was the liberation of Korea, which had been occupied by Japan since 1910. Korea was about to become a free nation, but instead an agreement between the Soviet Union and the United States established the thirty-eighth parallel as a temporary dividing line for military operations by the two powers in the Far East, and as a result Korea was cut in half. In 1945 the Soviets withdrew their troops from North Korea, after having installed a loyal Communist government headed by Kim II Sung. The Korean Democratic People's Republic was founded in the north. In the south, a pro-American government was formed under Syngman Rhee, the Republic of Korea. Each government claimed to represent the entire Korean people.

On the thirty-eighth parallel, violent clashes started by North Korea on June 25, 1950, led to a war between the two Koreas. Soviet historiography claims to this day that it was South Korea which started the war.³⁵ Never­theless, Khrushchev's memoirs provide testimony that confirms the facts generally known before then. His account is essentially as follows.

The war was started at the initiative of Kim II Sung, with the support of Mao and Stalin. Kim arrived in Moscow at the end of 1949 and suggested launching a military attack against the South, so that the people would rise up and establish a people's government (Communist). Stalin hesitated, fearing American intervention. In the end, he offered Kim II Sung the opportunity to give more consideration to the situation and return with a concrete plan. "Naturally," wrote Khrushchev,

Stalin couldn't oppose this idea. It appealed to his convictions as a Com­munist all the more because the struggle would be an internal matter which the Koreans would be settling among themselves. The North Koreans wanted to give a helping hand to their brethren who were under the heel of Syngman Rhee. . . . Stalin, of course, didn't try to dissuade him.

What Khrushchev wrote further is extremely revealing of the ways of thinking of Soviet leaders, who always claim to defend world peace. "In my opinion, no real Communist would have tried to dissuade Kim II Sung from his compelling desire to liberate South Korea from Syngman Rhee and from reactionary American influence. To have done so would have contradicted the Communist view of the world. I don't condemn Stalin for encouraging Kim. On the contrary, I would have made the same decision"³⁶ [emphasis added—A. N.].

Stalin solicited Mao's advice. The Chinese leader approved Kim's pro­posal. Soviet leaders and Kim И Sung celebrated the beginning of the undertaking at Stalin's dacha. Shipments of Soviet arms to Korea began. Soviet airforce units were put into place near Pyen Yan. This is how Khrushchev described the ensuing events:

The attack was launched successfully. The North Koreans swept south swiftly. But what Kim II Sung had predicted—an internal uprising... unfortunately failed to materialize. ... [There] weren't enough internal forces for a Com­munist insurrection in South Korea. Apparently the Party's preparatory orga­nizational work had been inadequate. Kim had believed that South Korea was blanketed with Party organizations and that the people would rise up in revolt when the Party gave the signal. But this never happened.³⁷

For Khrushchev, the North Korean offensive was justified because this was not a conflict between two peoples, but a war between classes.³⁸

On June 27, 1950, the UN Security Council met to discuss the situation resulting from the North Korean invasion of South Korea. On the agenda was the condemnation of aggression and a proposal to aid the Korean Republic. Curiously, the Soviet delegate was absent from the meeting. He said he was protesting the fact that China was represented by a delegate from Formosa. The Soviet Union abstained from using its veto power in the Security Council and allowed the body to recommend that all members provide South Korea with assistance, "which is necessary to repel inter­national aggression and bring peace and security to the region."³⁹ Later, the USSR called the resolution illegal. Stalin was convinced that the North Korean offensive together with the Communist resurrection in the South would bring total victory to the North before any foreign military intervention took place. But his hopes proved false. The United Nations asked for troops to restore Korean peace and the United States sent troops stationed in Japan. A bloody war began which lasted three years.

At first the scales tipped toward North Korea, whose troops reached Pusan in the far south by mid-September. The offensive was cut short when 50,000 Americans landed in the South. Then China sent its own divisions to assist North Korea. At the end of November 1950 the South Koreans and the Americans, commanded by General Mac Arthur, carried out a successful offensive, pushing the North Korean and Chinese troops back north of the thirty-eighth parallel.

The Soviet Union, which had sanctioned the original North Korean mil­itary action and provided material assistance, found itself in a tight situ­ation. Soviet advisers were present in Korea, and some airborne divisions had been deployed to the provinces of northeast China.⁴⁰ According to an official Soviet publication, "In case of deterioration of the situation, the USSR was prepared to send five divisions into Korea to help the Democratic People's Republic push back American aggression."⁴¹ In reality, when the North Korean troops found themselves isolated in the South, Stalin issued orders for the immediate recall of Soviet advisers, fearing they might be taken prisoner and constitute proof of Soviet involvement in the war.

The situation in Korea was saved for the Communist side by the inter­vention of China, which Stalin approved. The joint offensive by UN and South Korean forces ran out of steam, and they withdrew to positions along the thirty-eighth parallel. On November 30 Truman threatened to use the atomic bomb.⁴² The danger of military confrontation between the USSR and the United States was very real; it would have led to World War III. Both sides felt they had gone too far. As a result, in mid-1951 the front was stabilized, but the fire of war was not extinguished for quite a long time.

FROM WAR TO PEACE

What was the population of the USSR at the end of World War II? Official statistics do not furnish any figures for 1945, but we do have figures for 1950: 178.5 million people, 15.6 million less than before the war.⁴³

After the war the birth rate began to decline. During the 1950s it was no more than 25 per 1,000; the corresponding figure before the war had been 30 per 1,000. During the first years after the war, this decline stemmed from the fact that entire age groups of adult males had been decimated. But the decline continued during the 1960s, and even increased. It is necessary therefore to take into account the unfavorable economic and social factors contributing to the decrease in the birth rate, such as low salaries, the deep-rooted housing crisis, and the constant increase in em­ployment of female labor in production.

In 1971—72, there were half as many births per 1,000 women between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine as there had been in 1938—39.⁴⁴ During the first postwar years, the working-age population was also significantly smaller than before the war.

The Soviet economy, particularly in the occupied areas, had been se­riously impaired by war. The concentration of effort on war production had led to a major reduction of population resources and a decrease in the production of consumer goods. During the war, construction of housing units, which were already inadequate, was sharply curtailed—at a time when housing suffered great destruction.

The transition period from war to peace was relatively short. On Sep­tember 4, 1945, the State Defense Committee was dissolved and its func­tions transferred to the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom).⁴⁵ Departments of the arms industry were reorganized. Tanks and artillery production was reconverted to the production of tractors and transportation machinery.

The regions destroyed by the war required major capital investments. According to Soviet official figures, 1,710 towns and cities had been par­tially or totally destroyed, as were approximately 70,000 villages, 32,000 industrial enterprises, 65,000 kilometers of railroad. In addition, some 25 million people had lost their homes.⁴⁶ The Fourth Five-Year Plan allocated 40 percent of all capital investments—115 billion rubles—to parts of the economy either destroyed or damaged by the war.⁴⁷

The return to normalcy took place under difficult circumstances. The population was reduced to a state of misery. A famine devastated the southern part of the country, and armed movements persisted in the regions newly annexed to the Soviet Union.

In September 1946 uniform prices replaced the system of double pricing: commercial prices, on the one hand; and those charged under the rationing system, on the other. The result was increased prices for basic foodstuffs for the bulk of the urban population. The price of a kilogram of rye bread went from 1 to 3.4 rubles, a kilogram of meat from 14 to 30 rubles, sugar from 5.5 to 15 rubles, butter from 26 to 66 rubles, milk from 2.5 to 8 rubles.

At the same time that uniform state prices were established, lower-paid workers were granted a "bread supplement" of 110 rubles per month (in old rubles), and all those paid less than 900 rubles a month received salary increases. At that point, the minimum monthly salary was 300 rubles. The average salary was 475 rubles in 1946, and 550 in 1947.

During the war and the first postwar years prices rose sharply because of the devaluation of the ruble, shortages of goods and foodstuffs, and the existence of several widely disparate price levels.

At the end of 1947 a monetary reform—the revaluation of the ruble— was introduced. The old bank notes were exchanged for new ones, at a rate of ten to one. People with deposits in savings banks were given a more favorable rate than those who had kept their savings at home. The inhab­itants of rural areas suffered most from the reform, followed in part by those speculators who had enormous sums in their possession. Undoubtedly, this reform had a revitalizing effect on the Soviet economy.

The war economy had given a boost to some branches of production, such as aircraft, motor vehicles (tanks and tractors), and special steels, and new oil fields had been opened in the eastern part of the country. But on the whole, industrial production was in trouble.

At the end of the war, metal production was approximately on the level of 1933-1935,⁴⁸ while that of tractors was on the 1930 level.⁴⁹ With the transition to a peacetime economy, total production reached no higher than 92 percent of its prewar level.⁵⁰ By as early as 1948, however, industrial production was 18 percent higher than before the war, and it continued to grow.⁵¹

At the end of World War II the Soviet Union had an enormous army of more than 11 million. After demobilization, it was reduced to less than one-third that size. In 1948 the Soviet armed forces numbered 2,483,000. Seven years later, however, that figure had doubled.

The Soviet Union hastened to develop its own atomic bomb, seeking to end the U.S. monopoly in that area. For this purpose, the best scientists were mobilized both inside the USSR and among foreign sympathizers. Soviet intelligence launched a mass recruitment drive for agents who could obtain any information concerning atomic energy. Several specialized in­stitutes, restricted towns, and experimental sites were established. Beria, the head of state security, was personally put in charge of the project. A special Ministry of Medium Machine Building was set up; it was in reality a ministry for the development and use of atomic energy.

In 1949 the USSR officially announced it had the atomic bomb⁵² and in 1953 the hydrogen bomb.⁵³ Stalin could be completely satisfied with him­self: The Soviet Union had become an atomic power.

In 1950 the USSR started the first postwar stage of the arms race. Direct military spending in 1952, on the eve of Stalin's death, accounted for nearly one-fourth of the total annual budget.⁵⁴ The restoration of heavy industry was largely complete at the end of 1950. Production of steel, rolled iron, and petroleum increased substantially over prewar levels.⁵⁵ New metal­lurgical plants were built in the Baltic states, Transcaucasia, Central Asia, and Kazakhstan.

In contrast, the production of consumer goods at the end of the Fourth Five-Year Plan still had not reached the prewar level. As before, the population suffered from shortages of basic necessities and the severe housing crisis. In Moscow, however, investments were being made, in skyscrapers, giant structures meant to immortalize the Stalin era, and the Soviet government generously distributed gifts among its Eastern satellites, such as universities, institutes, and hospitals.

The state invested major sums in the development of health care in this period. Preventive medicine was improved in the cities, but the hospital situation was always dismal. There were shortages of beds, staff, and essential medicine. Medical personnel, doctors and nurses—to say nothing of technicians—remained among the lowest-paid categories.

The nation's economic development limped along, hampered as before by the perennial problems of the Soviet system. All economic questions, regardless of their size, were decided by the central government, while initiative by local economic agencies was kept to a minimum. Moscow set the plan for each enterprise, often without any realistic assessment of its capabilities. Each factory inevitably depended on other sectors of industry for the supply of raw materials and related enterprises. The transportation system was constantly late with deliveries. The absurdity of this supercen- tralized system was such that thousands of kilometers existed between suppliers, producers, and related enterprises. It was not unusual to have raw materials produced in the Far East delivered to central Russia when the same material could have been found close at hand, but in the possession of some other agency or department. Bad management and chaos engen­dered interruptions of production, "storming" at the end of the planning period, and enormous material waste.

The concentration of decision making at the center also led to a swelling of the bureaucratic apparatus. A multitude of unnecessary central inspec­tion operations were instituted. Industries were caving in under the ava­lanche of commissions, inquests, and investigations. A huge army of "fixers" (itolkachi), employees especially charged with procuring raw materials and hard-to-get items, motors and the like, invaded factories, offices, and ministries. Bribery became the accepted way of doing business. The gov­ernment attempted to fight corruption but could accomplish nothing because corruption had become an integral part of the system.

Another pillar of the system was "pokazukha" the practice of deliberately deceiving the higher authority about the rate of production and the fulfill­ment of plan targets. Plant managers were often afraid to tell the truth concerning the state of production and preferred to submit triumphant- sounding reports claiming fulfillment or overfulfillment of the plan or higher labor productivity. They would scheme endlessly to avoid being ranked among the "delayers." For this reason, official statistics must be viewed with great caution; many statistics, as was later officially admitted, were simply false.

The lie became a way of life. Enterprises deceived ministries. District party committees misled regional committees, which in turn provided false information to the Central Committee. As for the Central Committee mem­bers, especially the top leaders, they in turn lied to the people, to them­selves, and to all humanity.

During the 1950s construction projects for hydroelectric complexes on the Dnepr and the Volga began. In 1952, with prison camp labor, the 101- kilometer Volga—Don Canal was completed, linking the White, Baltic, Caspian, Azov, and Black seas into a single water transport system.

The canals, the power plants, the factories using their power, and man- made "seas" of artificial lakes were built, as a rule, without the least regard for the ecology. Rivers passing through large populated areas were polluted with industrial waste. Animal life in the rivers began to die off. Fishing on the Volga and its tributaries, which had long been the pride of all Russia, was endangered. Valuable forested areas and lowlands were flooded and adjacent land turned into marshes—for example, in the area of the "Sea of Rybinsk."⁵⁶ Scientists, local authorities, and ordinary people tried to stop this pitiless destruction of natural resources, but in vain. Once a plan had been approved by the central government, it could not be changed.

After the war, administrative reforms were frequently introduced and the nature and functions of specific economic bodies changed, but no essential change in economic planning and management resulted.

On March 15, 1946, the title people's commissar was changed back to the old term, minister. In its own way this underlined the autonomous power of the state, which had long since ceased to depend on "the people." On Stalin's orders, the employees of many ministries—waterworks, justice, foreign affairs—began wearing the same uniforms as military personnel, police, agents of state security, and railroad employees. Civilian as well as military ranks and titles were also introduced in all areas.⁵⁷

Evidence of the deep reaction that came over the Soviet Union in these years was the 1947 law forbidding marriages between Soviet citizens and foreigners.

The terror of the 1930s had undermined the basic social unit, the family. Ideological divisions and the informer system shook the foundations of the urban family, already unstable after the revolution. As for the rural family, it was disintegrating under the impact of forced collectivization, impov­erishment, and the flight to the cities. The loss of an important part of the male population during the war had thrown millions of families into difficult, often dire conditions. Families with single mothers constituted a category numbering in the millions.

The code of family law in effect before and during the war, with its simple procedures for divorce and the right of abortion (but only on the basis of medical necessity), reflected the Marxist concepts of equality between the sexes and free love and had played an important part in the development of the Soviet society at its early stage. In and of itself, the law was commendable: it proclaimed total equality between men and women. But legal equality in all fields, including production, and the verbal as­surance of free access for women to all jobs and professions, was not backed up by economic and social conditions guaranteeing real equality. A woman had to face the dual obligation of materially supporting her family and performing the domestic tasks connected with childrearing. True, in all major industrial centers the state assumed the obligation of setting up child care centers, nurseries, and kindergartens, but their numbers were insuf­ficient. The problem was solved to some extent by the age-old institution known as grandmother.

At the end of the war, the state returned to the old "bourgeois" concept of the family as the basic unit of society. Stalin understood that a stable family would make the job of controlling the people much easier. Unreg­istered marriages and free love ran counter to the aims and practices of the Soviet state, with its policies of limiting movement and monitoring the lives of citizens through the internal passport system.

In 1944 a new family law was put into effect.⁵⁸ Thenceforth the state would recognize only registered marriages. The notion of illegitimate chil­dren was revived. Although these children received no such official des­ignation, a dash was entered in the "father" space on their birth certificates. Divorce procedures were made more difficult: mutual consent became nec­essary, and the state charged a rather large sum. The state also stressed the responsibility of the family to raise children in a Communist (i.e., conformist) spirit. The long-term objective of the law was to increase the population. Abortion was prohibited. Single mothers received government aid, and special government awards and honors were introduced for mothers of large families.

The 1944 law on the family reflected the social transformations the society had undergone. Present-day Soviet society, with its conformism and its deep longing for tranquility after long years of trials and sufferings was coming into being. If the first postrevolutionary generation wanted to break free of the constraints of the "old ways," the survivors of the 1920s and 1930s dreamed of stable family lives, perhaps even a return to the mythical "good old days." But the wishes of the population clashed sharply with the policies of the state. The family as the base unit of this unique form of society, which was absorbed by the state, could also become a source of resistance. For many, it was a shelter and a defense against the party's "all-seeing eyes" and the government's "all-hearing ears."

Schools continued to be separate for each sex, a practice put into effect during the war. This segregated education of schoolchildren had very neg­ative psychological consequences. Schoolboys wore military-type uniforms and caps reminiscent of those in the lycees of tsarist times. Putting uniforms on civil servants and schoolchildren was a way of regimenting society typical of Stalin's last years. There is rumored to have been a plan to introduce uniforms for full and corresponding members of the Academy of Sciences, but the number of stars for academicians' shoulder patches could not be decided upon.

The uniform dress codes in civilian life symbolized the essential features of Soviet society in the later Stalin years.

Agriculture

In 1947 famine struck a major part of the European territory of the country. The areas that had been occupied by the Germans, and pillaged by Germans and Soviets alike, were especially affected. The famine resulted from se­rious droughts, which struck the breadbasket of European Russia: a sig­nificant portion of the Ukraine, Moldavia, the lower Volga regions, central Russia, and the Crimea. During the preceding years the state had forced the kolkhozes to turn over to the state excessive amounts of grain, sometimes not even leaving enough for seed. Thus, the country had exhausted its grain reserves. Still the state demanded that the peasants, who had been completely robbed of grain, deliver millions of tons of grain. For example, in 1946, in the midst of the drought, Ukrainian collective farmers were forced to deliver 400 million poods (131 million centners). This figure, like most of the other plan targets, had been arbitrarily determined; it did not correspond in any way to the real capacities of Ukrainian agriculture.

In desperation the peasants wrote letters to the Ukrainian government in Kiev and the central government in Moscow, imploring them to intercede and save them from death. Khrushchev, who at the time was first party secretary in the Ukraine, after long hesitation and fearing that he would be accused of sabotage, decided to write a letter to Stalin asking for au­thorization to set up a temporary rationing system and retain some agri­cultural produce to feed the rural population.⁵⁹ Stalin crudely rejected the request in a reply sent by telegram. After that, hunger and death inevitably awaited the Ukrainian peasants. They began to die by the thousands. Cases of cannibalism were even reported. In his memoirs, Khrushchev quoted a letter sent to him by A. I. Kirichenko, first party secretary of the Odessa Region, who had visited a kolkhoz in the winter of 1946—47: "I found a scene of horror," said he. 'The woman had the corpse of her own child on the table and was cutting it up. She was chattering away as she worked, 'We've already eaten Manechka. Now we'll salt down Vanechka. This will keep us for some time.' Can you imagine? This woman had gone crazy with hunger and butchered her own children."⁶⁰

But Stalin and his close assistants did not wish to acknowledge this terrible reality. The merciless Kaganovich was sent to the Ukraine as the party's first secretary. Khrushchev fell temporarily into disgrace and was transferred to the post of chairman of the Ukrainian Council of People's Commissars. But no mere reshuffling of personnel could save the situation. The famine continued and took nearly a million lives.

After the end of the war, energetic measures were taken to assimilate the newly annexed western parts of Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Moldavia into the political and economic system existing in the rest of the country. Several methods were used, including deportations, agrarian reform, "de- kulakization," collectivization, and the importation of settlers from the old parts of the Soviet Union.

First came a new deportation of "politically unreliable" and "alien class" elements. In the countryside, property was confiscated from the rich land­owners, and in the initial stages land was divided among the poor and landless peasants. But very soon, as early as 1947, collectivization began, meeting resistance from the peasantry. Two years after the beginning of collectivization, for example, in the summer of 1949, despite all means of coercion, pressure, deportation, and intimidation, 30 percent of all peasant households in Estonia remained in individual hands.

In Latvia the stage of agrarian reform was rapidly concluded. The official history of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic says that the party, following tradition, "went from a policy of limiting the kulaks to eliminating them as a class. In forming kolkhozes, the peasants would vote not to include kulaks in them." But as was to be expected, "wreckers" soon made their appearance. "Active saboteurs," the book tells us, "were brought to justice; other kulaks were expelled from the country [i.e., deported to Siberia— A. N.] and their lands annexed to the kolkhozes."⁶¹ Mass arrests in the Baltic countries did not spare even deputies to the Supreme Soviet. In Lithuania, when one of the victims said, "What are you doing? I am a deputy!" the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) arresting officer replied calmly, "No matter, there is a need for deputies in Siberia, too."

The authors of the textbook History of the USSR: The Epoch of Socialism, published in 1974, wrote:

The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party, with its resolution of May 21, 1947, on the formation of kolkhozes in the Baltic countries, warned the local authorities that in this important question they should not be hasty and recommended that kolkhozes be created on a fully voluntary basis with modern machinery and well-equipped machine and tractor stations (MTSs) available. In preparing for collectivization, the most basic forms of peasant cooperation played an important role.⁶²

The textbook accurately reported the wording of the resolution but sig­nificantly said nothing about the actual events. The following excerpts from a 1958 History of the Latvian SSR do.

There was no attempt, it reports, to "use existing forms of agricultural cooperation... as a point of departure. The large network of agricultural cooperatives, which embraced nearly three-quarters of the small farms in Latvia, was dismantled. ... Collectivization of the bulk of the peasantry was carried out in the spring of 1949 at a forced pace which, in a number of cases, led to a violation of the voluntary principle."⁶³ The disparity between these two versions of history is immense. The first falsifies the situation; the second addresses what actually took place. The first does not mention that forced collectivization was a cause of the outbreak of armed resistance in the Latvian countryside, which was followed by mass repres­sion. The second version makes it clear: 'The Soviet government was forced to isolate a portion of the kulaks and other hostile elements."⁶⁴

The armed resistance to forced collectivization continued in Lithuania for several years. In September 1952, at the Seventh Congress of the Lithuanian Communist party, great attention was paid to the struggle against the "bandit underground of bourgeois nationalists" and against "surviving elements of bourgeois nationalist ideology and religious superstition."⁶⁵

Throughout the 1940s the Baltic countries were the scene of sometimes bitter armed struggle against the Soviet government. Collectivization also spurred armed resistance in the western regions of Byelorussia.⁶⁶

During the first five years after the war, extensive industrialization of the Baltic countries was carried out, based on reconstructing the old and creating a new power system. Three years after the end of the war industrial development had already surpassed prewar levels.

The volume of industrial production in Estonia, especially in the chem­ical and engineering industries, had grown by 1950 to over 3.4 times its prewar level.⁶⁷ Also by 1950 the number of blue collar and white collar workers in the Baltic countries had increased by 40 percent since 1940.⁶⁸ In Latvia industrial production in 1950 was three times the prewar level; for the same period in Lithuania it was twice the prewar level.⁶⁹

The industrialization of the Baltic states destroyed the old social struc­ture. The ethnic composition of the population changed rapidly, especially in Latvia and Estonia, which were more developed industrially. Many Rus­sians and Ukrainians were settled in the cities, and many were appointed to important positions. Many naval personnel appeared in Baltic ports. The Soviet government's principal objective was to alter the national composition of the population in the Baltic states and to create a solid base of support out of non-Baltic elements.

The difficulties in agriculture in the first postwar years throughout the Soviet Union were intensified by the enormous damage done by the war. The German invaders had devastated 98,000 kolkhozes and 1,876 sovkhozes,⁷⁰ confiscated and slaughtered millions of head of livestock, and deprived the rural localities almost completely of their draft animals in the occupied territories. In agricultural areas the active population was reduced by almost one-third.

The sharp reduction of the human resources in the countryside was also a result of the natural process of urban growth. On the average, as many as 2 million people left the rural areas each year.⁷¹ The difficult conditions in the countryside led young people especially to migrate to the cities. Many demobilized soldiers also chose to settle in the cities rather than return to agriculture.

During the war large tracts of land belonging to the kolkhozes had been transferred to enterprises or municipalities or illegally appropriated by them. In other areas land had become an object of commerce. A 1939 resolution of the Central Committee and the Sovnarkom adopted measures against selling off kolkhoz lands. From the point of view of the "revolution from above," which was being carried out in the countryside, this tendency toward a return to private property exposed the fact that regardless of how much the state sought to hide it, no abrupt psychological change had ever taken place within the peasantry. To the peasants, revolution had been an act of oppression rather than justice, since land confiscated from the old owners had not been divided among the peasantry but turned over to the kolkhozes, that is, taken by the government. Then, during the war, land had been strong-armed by factories and municipal authorities.

The Soviet government was fully aware of what these occurrences meant. In a new decree against selling off kolkhoz lands, on September 19, 1946, the Council of Ministers and Central Committee called these "deviations" in the countryside "deeply damaging to the work of the kolkhozes and extremely dangerous to the overall process of socialist construction in our country. "⁷²

By the beginning of 1947, over 2,225,000 cases of unauthorized appro­priation or use of land had been discovered, affecting a total of 4.7 million hectares. Between 1947 and May 1949, the misuse of an additional 5.9 million hectares came to light.⁷³ Government bodies—from the local to the republic level—were shamelessly robbing the kolkhozes, using all sorts of pretexts to impose what amounted to payment in kind. In September 1946 the standing debt owed to the kolkhozes by various agencies and organi­zations reached 383 million rubles.⁷⁴ In 1947, in the Akmolinsk Region of Kazakhstan, the authorities took from the kolkhozes 1,500 head of cattle and 3,000 centners of grain and other foodstuffs, for a total value of 2 million rubles. The thieves, who included high-ranking party and govern­ment officials, never had to answer for their actions.⁷⁵

The misuse of kolkhoz land and goods aroused widespread indignation among the collective farm peasantry (kolkhozniks). Many kolkhoz chairmen were voted out, but the new kolkhoz heads were unable to change govern­ment policies, and the situation remained at an impasse.

After the war, tractor and agricultural machinery production increased rapidly. Despite this improvement, however, the situation in agriculture remained catastrophic. The state continued its policy of investing very little in agriculture—only 16 percent of the budget during the first postwar five- year plan. Crops sown on cultivated land in 1946 were only 76 percent of the amount sown in 1940. Drought and other natural disasters reduced the 1946 harvest below the level of the previous year, when the country had still been at war. "In terms of grain production, our country remained for a long time at the same level as the Russia of the old regime," Khrushchev acknowledged.⁷⁷ Between 1910 and 1914 grain harvests comprised 267 million kilograms; the figure was 302 million for the period 1949—1953.⁷⁸ Grain yields were below the 1913 level, despite mechanization, fertilization, and other improvements.

(in centners per hectare)

8.2

Grain Yield 1913

1926

1932 1933-1937 1949-1953

8.5 7.5 7.1 7.7

The per capita output of agricultural products was correspondingly lower. If the two years before collectivization (1928—1929) are taken as 100, agricultural production in 1913 was 90.3, but in 1930—1932 it was 86.8; in 1938-1940, 90.0; and in 1950-1953, 94.0.⁷⁹ The grain situation be­came acute despite reductions in grain exports (which fell from 1913 to

1938 by a factor of 4.5) and the reduced number of livestock and the consequent reduction in the amount of grain used as cattle feed. From 1928 to 1935, for example, the number of horses fell by 25 million, which meant a saving of more than 10 million tons of grain, or 10—15 percent of the total grain harvest in that period.⁸⁰

In 1916 Russia had within its territory 58,380,000 head of horned cattle. As of January 1, 1941, the figure was 54,510,000, and in 1951 57,090,000, which was lower than the 1916 level.⁸¹ Not until 1955 was the 1916 level exceeded.⁸² According to official Soviet statistics (adjusted for inflation), between 1940 and 1952 overall agricultural production increased by only 10 percent.⁸³

The February 1947 Central Committee plenum called for more central­ization of agricultural production, taking from the kolkhozes the decision not only of how much but of what to plant. Political sections were rees­tablished at the MTSs. Propaganda was to substitute for food for the utterly starved and impoverished collective farmers. In addition to their deliveries to the state, the kolkhozes had to contribute to the seed fund and allocate a portion of the harvest to the "indivisible fund," a kind of capital fund. It was not until these obligations were met that the collective farmers could be paid for their workdays (trudodni). Quotas for deliveries to the state were set by the central government. Projected crop yields were estimated carelessly, and actual harvests were often below plan targets. The first commandment for collective farmers was to hand over to the state its quota. Local party and government bodies would often force the more efficient kolkhozes to fill in their poorer neighbors' unmet quotas, which ultimately led to the impoverishment of all. The peasants fed themselves for the most part with the produce they grew on their minuscule private plots. To be able to take these goods to the market, however, they were required to have a certificate stating that they had met their obligations to the state; otherwise they were branded as speculators or "deserters" and faced fines or even prison sentences. Taxes on private plots were increased and had to be paid in kind, often in goods that the kolkhozniks did not produce. For this reason, producers were forced to obtain goods at market price and deliver them to the state free of charge. Rural Russia had not seen such horrible conditions even under the Mongol yoke.

In 1952 state prices for grain deliveries were lower than in 1940. The price the state paid for potatoes was less than the cost of transportation. Kolkhozes were receiving an average of 8.63 rubles per centner for grain, while sovkhozes were getting 27.90 rubles. A collective farmer had to put in sixty workdays to purchase one kilogram of butter, and to clothe himself modestly required one year's income.⁸⁴

In the early 1950s the central authorities' continuous arbitrary decisions on what and how to plant resulted in extremely poor harvests in most kolkhozes and sovkhozes, even in such favorable areas as the Volga region, the central black earth region, and Kazakhstan. Foolish orders from on high and shortages of machinery did not explain everything, however. Poor harvests were also the result of the fact that, over the course of many years, little by little, the peasants' love of working the land had been destroyed. In the past the earth had repaid their toil and devotion, sometimes gen­erously, sometimes less so. But this stimulus, falsely labeled by the au­thorities the "stimulus of material interest," no longer existed. Working the land was turning into forced labor, with little or no compensation.

Many collective farmers went hungry; others suffered from malnutrition. Their private plots were their only salvation. The situation was particularly harsh in European Russia. Things were better in Central Asia because of price increases, particularly for cotton, the main crop. They were also better in the south, which specialized in vegetables, fruits, and wine.

In 1950 a campaign of consolidation and amalgamation of kolkhozes was initiated. By 1953 the number of kolkhozes had decreased from 237,000 to 93,000.⁸⁵ This reform could also have strengthened them economically, but lack of investments, forced deliveries to the state at fixed low prices, the lack of sufficient trained technicians and specialists, and finally, the limitations imposed by the state on the use of private plots deprived the collective farmers of incentive and destroyed any hope of extricating them­selves from their dire situation.

In 1951 Khrushchev proposed that the Gordian knot strangling agricul­ture be cut by the creation of "agrocities"—that is, large-scale agricultural enterprises to replace the numerous and weak kolkhozes. He was sharply criticized for this proposal in the press, which was quite unusual, keeping in mind Khrushchev's status as a Politburo member. Such a move would have amounted to an admission that the party's agricultural policies had been a fiasco for many years. Khrushchev's idea recalled Stolypin's agrarian reform shortly before the revolution, which aimed at creating large peasant farms producing for the market. Khrushchev, at mid-century, was advocating profitable agricultural enterprises based on the transformation of collective farmers into agricultural workers. The material basis for an effective im­plementation of Khrushchev's plan, however, was lacking.

The government continued to trumpet success, openly lying to the Rus­sian people and the world about the achievements of the "socialist" state. At the Nineteenth Party Congress, in the political report, Malenkov an­nounced without batting an eye that the Soviet Union's grain problems had

been solved and 8 million poods (2.6 million centners) of grain had been harvested.⁸⁶ Two years later, after Stalin's death, it was officially announced that all figures relating to agricultural production had been inflated.

The 33 million collective farmers, whose labor was feeding a population of 200 million, constituted, with the exception of prisoners, the poorest and most downtrodden sector of society.

The Working Class and Urban Population

One of the first measures adopted by the Provisional Government after the February 1917 revolution was the introduction of the eight-hour workday. Previously the workday had lasted from ten to twelve hours. For the peasants the workday was irregular, as is always true in agriculture. In 1927 the seven-hour working day was introduced for the urban population. This important social advance lasted until 1940, when the eight-hour day was reimposed. Antilabor legislation, already discussed in Chapter 7, was im­plemented the same year. Those laws remained on the books until 1956.

According to official Soviet statistics, the average wage of a Soviet worker increased more than 1,100 percent between the beginning of industriali­zation in 1928 and the end of the Stalin era in 1954.⁸⁷ But this does not give us any idea of real wages. Soviet sources provide fantastic figures which do not correspond to reality. Estimates by Western researchers sug­gest that, in the best of cases, the cost of living increased by a factor of between nine and ten from 1928 to 1954. At the same time, however, the Soviet worker enjoyed numerous benefits, including free medical care and education.

According to Janet Chapman, an American expert on the Soviet economy, benefits paid to blue collar and white collar workers in addition to wages amounted to the following percentages (adjusted for price changes): in 1928, 15.8 percent; in 1937, 22.1 percent; in 1940, 20.7 percent; in 1948, 29.6 percent; in 1952, 22.2 percent; and in 1954, 21.5 percent.⁸⁸

Taking 1928 as a base of 100, the cost of living underwent the following changes during the same period (1928= 100):

1937 1940 1944 1948 1952 1954 478 679 952 1565 1053 900

Thus, at the end of the Stalin era the cost of living had increased by a factor of nine to ten over the period before collectivization.⁸⁹

If taxes and obligatory loans to the government (purchases of bonds) are excluded and the value of social benefits included, the change in real wages for the same period was as follows:⁹⁰

1928 1937 1940 1944 1948 1952 1954 100 86 78 64 59 94 119

This table demonstrates that the increase in wages and salaries was less than the increase in the cost of living. By 1948, for example, wages were twice those of 1937, but the cost of living was three times higher. The lowering of real wages was also the result of increases in taxes and obligatory purchases of government bonds (in effect, loans to the state out of workers' wages). By 1952 there was a significant rise in real wages, but they were still lower than in 1928, although they had exceeded the 1937 and 1940 levels.

To form a clearer picture of the situation the Soviet worker faced compared to his Western counterpart, let us examine the quantity of produce each could buy with one hour's wages. If the Soviet worker's wages are taken as a base of 100, we get the following picture:⁹¹

Country

1928

1936-1938

1950

1951-1952

Soviet Union

100

100

100

100

Austria

90

158

200

167

Czechoslovakia

94

142

329

—

France

112

283

221

200

Germany

142

213

271

233

Great Britain

200

192

443

361

United States

370

417

714

556

This table speaks for itself: in 1952, for the same amount of work, a British worker could buy 3.5 times more produce than a Soviet worker and an American 5.5 times more.

Soviet citizens, especially of the older generation, are generally con­vinced that under Stalin prices decreased every year, whereas under Khrushchev and his later successors they have constantly risen. This ex­plains the existence of a certain nostalgia for the Stalin era.

The mystery of those price decreases is exceptionally simple. First, prices registered a tremendous leap after the beginning of collectivization. The price of rye bread increased 950 percent between 1928 and 1937, and almost 1,800 percent between 1928 and 1952. During the same period the price of prime beef went up 950 percent and 1,600 percent; of pork, 950 and 1,950. The price of herring had increased 1,500 percent by 1952.

Sugar prices had increased 900 percent by 1937 and 1,500 percent by 1952; sunflower oil, 2,700 percent and 3,300 percent; eggs, 1,050 percent and 1,830 percent; and potatoes, 400 percent and 1,000 percent.⁹² After raising prices between 1,500 and 2,000 percent, it was fairly easy to put on the charade of a yearly price drop.

Second, price decreases occurred at the expense of the kolkhozes; that is, the state paid extraordinarily low fixed prices for agricultural products. In 1953 government procurement prices in Moscow and Leningrad prov­inces were as low as 2.5 to 3 kopeks for a kilogram of potatoes.⁹³

Lastly, the majority of the population never noticed any differences in prices because supplies were short, and in many regions meat, fats, and other goods never reached the stores.

This was the "secret" of the price drops of the Stalin era. Twenty-five years after the revolution, the Soviet worker had a poorer diet than the Western worker.

The housing crisis also grew worse. By comparison with prerevolutionary times, when there were serious housing problems in densely populated cities (in 1913, seven square meters per person), the crisis reached di­sastrous proportions in the years after the revolution, especially during collectivization. Masses of rural inhabitants poured into the cities to escape famine or in search of work. During the Stalin era civilian housing con­struction was tightly limited. Only high-ranking party and government of­ficials received apartments in the cities. In Moscow, for example, in the early 1930s an enormous housing complex arose in Bersenevskaya Em- barkment near the Stone Bridge. It was called Government House and had spacious and comfortable apartments. Some hundred meters from it another complex was located, a former poorhouse converted into communal apart­ments, each inhabited by between twenty and thirty persons, with one kitchen and one or two bathrooms each.

Before the revolution, most of the workers lived in barracks next to their factories; after the revolution the barracks were renamed. They were called "communal dwellings" (obshchezhitiya). The larger enterprises built new homes for managerial personnel and engineers, but the housing problem remained unsolved because the lion's share of the budget was allocated to industry, especially the war industry, and energy production.

For the vast majority of the urban population during the Stalin era housing conditions grew worse every year: population growth generally exceeded the pace of civilian housing construction. In 1928 there were 5.8 square meters per inhabitant; in 1932, 4.9; in 1937, 4.6. The First Five-Year Plan called for the construction of 62.5 million square meters of new housing, but only 23.5 million were built. The Second Five-Year Plan called for 72.5 million square meters; only 26.8 million were built.⁹⁴ In 1940 the average per capita living space had fallen to 4.5 square meters.

Two years after Stalin's death, when the mass construction of buildings began, each city dweller had 5.1 square meters. For a better idea of the crowded living conditions, we should recall that the officially prescribed Soviet standard is 9 square meters per person (in Czechoslovakia the stan­dard was 17 square meters). Many families had only 6 square meters. Entire clans, two or three generations each, shared a single room.

The example of Mrs. A, a cleaning lady at a large Moscow enterprise, is indicative. She was part of a clan of thirteen people, living in one room of twenty square meters. The room had seven beds. The six other people, adults or children, slept on the floor. Sexual relations took place virtually in the open. People had become accustomed to it and paid no attention after a while. For fifteen years the three families that lived in that room asked in vain to be relocated. They were not able to move until the early 1960s.

These were the conditions of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of city dwellers. In 1975 in Moscow the housing bureaus still refused to handle requests from people who had more than five square meters per person. Such was the legacy of the Stalin era.

Low labor productivity was and remained the Achilles' heel of the Soviet economy, even though attempts were made to raise it through a complex system of incentives and bonuses. Between 1928 and 1955 production increased at an average of 100 percent for the Soviet economy as a whole. If the plan was fulfilled or overfulfilled, a bonus was paid. As a general rule, bonuses were higher for engineers and technicians than for industrial workers.⁹⁵

In theory, the working class was the driving force of society, but its real political impact declined steadily as the bureaucratic elite grew in number and as its role in the state expanded. The identification of the interests of the elite with those of the entire people found its reflection in basic party documents, as well as in the rules and programs of the CPSU. At the end of the Stalin era, the formula that the party is the organized vanguard of the working class in the Soviet Union (Seventeenth Party Congress, 1934) was replaced by the formula that it is a "voluntary militant union of Com­munists who share the same ideas" (Nineteenth Party Congress, 1959). This shift not only signified a transition from the concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" to that of the "whole peoples' state," it was also an admission of the reduced role played by the working class in spite of the leadership's continued proclamations of its role as a driving force.

The Party

During the last two or three years of the war a policy was adopted of drastically increasing the number the Soviet Communist party members in the army and the reserves. The party's authority was restored in accordance with success on the battlefield, as is shown by the following figures.

On January 1, 1941, the party had 3,872,000 members. During the war more than 3 million were killed.⁹⁶ Nevertheless, by January 1946 party membership had reached 5,511,000.⁹⁷ Growth was particularly rapid from the second half of 1942 to the end of the war. In the second half of 1941, 343,500 new members (full and candidate members) joined the party; during the second half of 1942, 1,147,000 joined; in 1942, 2,794,000; and in 1944, 2,416,ООО.⁹⁸

Inside the army, joining the party was made easier by a special resolution reducing the probation period for candidate members from one year to six months in the case of those who had distinguished themselves in battle. During the war many joined the party out of conviction, seeing it as the organizer of the struggle against the Nazi invader. No special privileges were gained by joining. In fact, one was likely to be killed in battle sooner than others. "Communists, forward!" was not only a slogan; it was an everyday reality of life at the front. Naturally the political officers singled out certain individuals, urging them to join, and given conditions at the front, it was often impossible to refuse. In the rear, if many joined out of patriotic conviction, as many joined as a way of furthering their careers.

Statistics on the social composition of the party might be useful in corroborating the declining role of the working class in the Soviet Union, but no such statistics have been published in the USSR since the Seven­teenth Party Congress in 1934, when 60 percent of the membership were workers, or rather had come from the working class, because the percentage of members working in production was much smaller, 9.3 percent. Ac­cording to party tradition, functionaries of the party apparatus were and still are assigned to the working class category. Peasants constituted 8 percent of the membership in 1934, and white collar workers 32 percent.⁹⁹ Western researchers, using information about the educational level of delegates to party congresses and statistics derived from local party con­ferences and other sources, estimate that by the Nineteenth Party Congress in 1952 (the last under Stalin) workers constituted only 7.6 percent of the delegates and peasants 7.8 percent.¹⁰⁰

Despite the increased influx of workers and peasants during the war, the CPSU was actually transformed into a party of functionaries, specialists in various fields, and intellectuals in the service of the organization.¹⁰¹ Mem­bership for most of them was above all a means of advancing their careers. Politically the party's composition also changed radically. Most of the Old Bolsheviks had been killed in the terror of the 1930s, and the second generation of Communists suffered heavy losses during the war.

Similar changes affected the social composition of the soviets, from the local level up to the supreme soviets of the republics and the USSR. The higher the institution, the fewer the workers or peasants that were still "linked with production." And even those described in the statistics as active producers were in reality part of the new, power-corrupted labor or kolkhoz aristocracies. In 1937, of the deputies to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, 42 percent were listed as workers, 29.5 percent as peasants, and 28.5 percent as intelligentsia. In 1950 the corresponding figures were 31.8 percent, 20.4 percent, and 47.8 percent.¹⁰²

With grim determination the party continued to increase its influence, neglecting neither the material, the spiritual, nor the moral aspect of life for the "new Soviet man." Local party organizations were required to monitor the moral behavior of members and their families more rigorously. Informing the authorities about "amoral" behavior became common prac­tice. Party bureaus at enterprises and offices, local trade union com­mittees, and even higher party and government agencies were swamped by denunciations and complaints of all sorts. In the late Stalin era hypocrisy and sycophancy became a central characteristic of Soviet so­ciety.

The war accelerated the crystallization of the present-day form of modern Soviet society. However, completion of the process was continually impeded by arbitrariness and terror, which constantly threatened all levels of society, including the most highly placed in the bureaucracy.

During the war major shifts occurred in the structure of the bureaucracy. Its military wing acquired more weight, its numbers grew, and its castelike tendencies became more evident. During the terror of the 1930s the corps of generals had been almost completely annihilated. Those who had been spared were reduced to automatons who faithfully followed the orders of the party leadership. But the conditions of war were such that in spite of all the restrictions imposed by the high command, generals in the field had to make their own decisions. This revived their sense of responsibility and self-esteem, not only in their own eyes but in the eyes of the population as well. For a short time the marshals and generals enjoyed popularity. It is true that they were subjected to constant surveillance by State Security. Their adjutants, drivers, and mistresses often served as informers for the security agencies and more than one paid dearly for a carelessly spoken word. Soon after the end of the war, the most popular marshals began to be sent off to the provinces. Zhukov, the most famous of all, was sent to Odessa to command the military district. Others were assigned to occupation duties in Germany and Eastern Europe, some retired or were transferred to the reserves, and a few were sent to prison.

In an attempt to keep the officers in a state of perfect obedience, the government at first showered those returning from the front with consid­erable privileges. Senior officers were given land to build homes on, gen­erals were given larger lots. The top generals and marshals received government dachas fully equipped with the most modern conveniences on favorable terms. Exclusive stores and tailor's shops were established for all generals, where they and their families could purchase higher quality goods at very low prices.

During the war another wing of the bureaucracy acquired new size and strength: the managers of the big enterprises engaged in military production and construction.

The importance of the state security organs was also enhanced. The number of state security agents grew enormously. The officers of SMERSH (military counterintelligence) became the backbone of the security appa­ratus. The head of SMERSH became the head of state security for the entire country.

After the war the agencies of the judiciary, the procuracy, and the police were filled with demobilized officers. Often demobilized officers of peasant background were unable to find positions in the postwar army or in cities and became kolkhoz chairmen, but directing a kolkhoz could prove to be more difficult than commanding a battalion or even a company.

With the war over, people expected improvements in their situation. Instead, they were called upon for further sacrifices. The abstract idea of building socialism could no longer inspire enthusiasm in the exhausted population. The party then resorted to the proven method of frightening the population with the threat of imperialist aggression. Newspapers wrote that it was necessary to resist the offensive of the Western powers, who allegedly wished to steal the fruits of the victory over fascism from the Soviet people. This new enemy—Western imperialism—was very abstract, nebulous, elusive. It was a lot more practical to find an "enemy" inside. Then it could be identified. The "enemy" thus chosen was the intellectual, the "rootless cosmopolitan" whose name did not sound very Russian. This the population could understand easily. And for those who were not entirely sure, the press, lecturers, university professors, and experts in Marxism- Leninism (whose number grew constantly in the postwar years) explained the matter authoritatively and at great length.

The party's need to exploit patriotic sentiment was great. Stalin well understood that in the first postwar years patriotism was a very powerful ideological weapon. As was the case with all the formulas he used, Stalin's definition of patriotism was extremely simple: it was, he declared in his report on the twenty-seventh anniversary of the October revolution, "the deep devotion and the deep faith of the people toward its Soviet homeland and the fraternal friendship of the workers of all the nationalities in our country."¹⁰³

This notion also included awareness of the total superiority of Soviet society over all others and pride in being a part of it. The "new Soviet man," Homo Sovieticus, was encouraged to develop a feeling of special importance of his mission and of a special destiny. Such a superiority complex is the most dangerous attitude any society can have. It fosters the conviction that anything is permissible in the name of a greater goal. How great this goal actually is, however, depends entirely on the leadership that interprets it.

Soviet patriotism was, for the government, a means of forcing the people again to accept a hard existence and the new "temporary difficulties."

In another of his speeches, Stalin called the Soviet people "little screws" in a great machine.¹⁰⁴ Everyone knows about screws; they can be screwed in or out at will, and sometimes when treated roughly their heads fly off. The day after Stalin's speech members of the staff of one of the laboratories at the Aerodynamics Institute in Moscow lined up in the hallways and marched down the halls chanting, "We are little screws; we are nuts and bolts."

Lysenko, Lysenkoism, and Soviet Science

One of the most striking indications of the crisis of the Soviet system under Stalin was Lysenkoism.

The agrobiologist Trofim Lysenko successfully caught Stalin's attention by a very simple method. With the aim of winning an important position in science, he made a speech at the second congress of collective farmers with exemplary work records in February 1935, in which he asserted that while in the countryside the kulaks were fighting the Soviet government, in the city, the "kulaks of science" were doing the same. Stalin was the first to applaud, calling out, "Bravo, Comrade Lysenko. Bravo." This was the beginning of Lysenko's rise. Soon he became president of the Lenin Ail-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences and used his position to drive out the true geneticists, his scientific adversaries, and even saw to it that some were imprisoned. In 1940 the noted Russian botanist and geneticist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was arrested. He died in prison in 1943. Other leading scientists in the fields of biology and agronomy were arrested.¹⁰⁵ Lysenko's name is linked with a general social phenomenon, "Lysen- koism," similar to the Rasputin phenomenon in tsarist Russia. Rasputin promised the tsarina the salvation of Orthodox Russia. Lysenko promised the Central Committee, and Comrade Stalin personally, the creation, in a short time, of an abundance of agricultural products. Both Stalin and the Romanov family had hoped for a miracle, but the miracle Stalin and the Central Committee expected was "scientifically based."

Unlimited possibilities were made available to Lysenko in his effort to organize abundance, including the moral and physical right to destroy his opponents. The destruction of agrobiology and of geneticists and biologists, which had begun on the eve of the war, was started with renewed vigor soon after the war was over.

In the summer of 1948 Lysenko called for a public debate with his opponents, who supported the theory of heredity in the origin of species. They accepted the challenge, not even suspecting that Lysenko's report to the August 1948 session of the Lenin АН-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences had been approved beforehand by the Central Committee. Ly­senko's basic argument had been concealed until a convenient moment arose. The concluding act in the play came when the geneticists expressed themselves publicly, whereupon Lysenko told them that the Central Com­mittee had approved his theory, which denied the existence of genes and the theory of heredity. After Lysenko's acknowledgment, the geneticists, who were defending the right to have more than one scientific theory, again asked for the floor in order to announce their "repentence."¹⁰⁶

The August 1948 session of the academy gave the signal for repressive measures against geneticists. As a result, all scientific work in the field was halted, and hundreds of genuine researchers and experimental agron­omists lost their jobs. Lysenko's pseudo-science became established throughout the country, dealing Soviet agriculture yet another blow after collectivization and the war. Even today the Soviet economy has not com­pletely overcome these three catastrophes.

The August 1948 session was also the point of departure for a party offensive in the ideological field. The philosopher Prezent became Lysenko's closest assistant; he was assigned the task of giving a philosophical expla­nation for the new method. The session was presented to other fields as an example of the defense of Marxism-Leninism.

Genetics was effectively banned throughout the Soviet Union. Professor Nuzhdin, one of Lysenko's helpers, wrote shortly after the conclusion of the academy's session that "Mendelism-Morganism has been condemned. It has no place in Soviet science."¹⁰⁷ Nevertheless, in spite of harsh repres­sion, some centers of genetics were able to survive. For example, Aca­demician N. N. Semenov, director of the Institute of Chemical Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences and a future Nobel laureate, put a laboratory at the disposal of Professor Rapoport, a noted geneticist, without requiring any detailed reports on the nature of his research.

But Lysenkoism was not limited to the rise of Lysenko and his cronies to key positions in science and thereby in the Soviet bureaucracy. It also expressed the party's fundamental policy in regard to science. Like a cancer, Lysenkoism rapidly spread and metastasized.

In the summer of 1950 a joint session of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences announced that Academician К. M. Bykov and his disciples were the sole defenders of Pavlov's phys­iological theories. All other schools were declared hostile, and their activ­ities came to an end. Bykov was well liked in the party because of his servility, the positions he had taken in favor of Russian science and in opposition to any links with foreign science. Almost all Soviet biologists who had gained any recognition were declared apostates between 1948 and 1950: Academicians I. I. Shmalgauzen, A. R. Zhebrak, P. M. Zhukovsky. N. P. Dubinin, L. A. Orbeli and his school, and A. D. Speransky and his students. The least serious accusation was brought against Professor Anokhin—carelessness in methodology.¹⁰⁸

The main targets of these campaigns were Jewish scientists, for example, Academician Lina Shtern, a biologist, and her students, who were de­nounced for "the perfidious Zionist character" of their school. The physicist D. Biryukov wrote in Culture and Life that "the rotten methodology of this 'school' was supported by the arrant cosmopolitanism which had come to flourish within it."¹⁰⁹ The school of Georgian Academician I. Beritashvili was declared idealist and "openly hostile to the doctrines of Pavlov."¹¹⁰ The publishers responsible for the appearance of a translation of What's Life from the Standpoint of Physics, by the famous Austrian scientist E. Schrodinger, were also dragged through the mud.¹¹¹

The highpoint in the campaign to claim priority for Russian over Western science was a session of the USSR Academy of Sciences held in Leningrad January 5—10, 1949, and dedicated to the two hundred twenty-fifth an­niversary of the founding of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences. In his introductory remarks the president of the academy, S. I. Vavilov (the brother of Lysenko's victim), stressed the need for a struggle to affirm Russian science's primacy in discoveries. Among the claims to "firsts" advanced during the campaign of the years 1946—1950 were inventions in the fields of radio, electric lighting, the electric transformer, electrical transmission with direct and alternating current, electric-powered and diesel- powered ships, the airplane, the parachute, and the stratoplane. The dis­covery of the law of conservation of energy was attributed to Lomonosov. These are but a few examples of the claim, some of them so absurd that they inspired satirical sayings: "Soviet watches are the fastest in the world" and "Russia is the elephant's natural habitat."

The 1949 Academy of Sciences session in Leningrad marked a deliberate break with Western science. Three foreign members of the Academy were removed—the British scientist Dale, an honorary full member, and the American Muller and the Norwegian Brock, who were corresponding mem­bers. It is true that the first two had already announced their resignation from the Academy to protest the persecution of scientists in the USSR. Brock was expelled because of his articles on the situation of science in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.¹¹²

These campaigns of ideological purification were used by some to settle old grievances. The active participants of these pogroms would later hold the positions of the scientists accused of "cosmopolitanism" or "bourgeois liberalism." The research institutes of the academy and the universities were filled with graduates from the Academy of Social Sciences, which was under the party's Central Committee, and from the party's higher schools. Competence was no longer the criterion for selecting doctoral candidates; instead it was loyalty to the party and willingness to participate in any and all ideological pogroms.

During Stalin's last years, the level of Soviet research in the social sciences, already low, declined sharply, largely thanks to Stalin's new theoretical works, Marxism and Problems of Linguistics and Economic Prob­lems of Socialism in the USSR. As soon as they were printed, they became the object of universal study. The whole of social science was reduced to commentary on the Leader's new "works of genius." When Stalin issued a negative judgment on the linguistic theories of N. Marr, a new ideological crusade began, this time against "Marrism" and its defenders. An avalanche of denunciations descended upon Soviet linguists, archeologists, and eth­nographers, many of whom had shared Marr's theories on the evolution of language, theories which the party had previously supported. Stalin's writ­ings on the economy managed to confuse economists totally and were used as a pretext for new polemics and persecutions of scholars.

Physics was the only domain where the party's obscurantists were never able to rally scientists in the "struggle against hostile manifestations." True, the magazine Problems of Philosophy published inflammatory articles con­taining accusations of philosophic idealism and kowtowing to Western phys­ics, but they were dealing with a touchy subject. The desire to develop atomic weapons weighed far more heavily than the desire to conduct a pogrom against the physicists. During a meeting called to discuss the struggle against "rootless cosmopolitanism," Academician A. F. Ioffe, the leading atomic researcher, presented the representatives of the Central Committee who chaired the meeting with the following choice: scientists could either work in their laboratories or they could waste their time in useless meetings. If the latter choice was made, the organizers of the meetings would have to replace the scientists in the laboratory. Disarmed, the apparatchiki were forced to report that the meeting had taken place, and nothing more was heard of it. Shortly before, Academician Petr Kapitsa had categorically refused to take part in the atomic bomb project. The authorities did not want to risk alienating other physicists. Ioffe's remarks, like Kapitsa's attitude, were acts of resistance against the government, which in this instance felt powerless to take direct reprisals. Instead, it chose revenge. For many years, under both Stalin and Khrushchev, Kapitsa was denied permission to go abroad to attend international scientific meet­ings.¹¹³

One of the principal characteristics of the Soviet regime is continuous ideological struggle. It is unimportant against whom or what this struggle is directed; rather, it is the very process of struggle that is significant—a struggle into which the masses may be drawn, making them accomplices.

During the period of late Stalinism the main focus of ideological struggle was the affirmation of Soviet Russian patriotism. Given the specific con­ditions of the time, this form of nationalism took on a distinctly anti-Semitic coloration. The anti-Semitic policies of the Soviet government, which can be traced back to the 1920s, developed especially rapidly during the Nazi— Soviet rapprochement, when the government apparatus, mainly in the foreign affairs and state security agencies, was purged of Jews (as was described in Chapter 7).

In 1941 Erlich and Alter, two Polish socialists of Jewish origin who had fled to the Soviet Union, were executed on "espionage" charges. The ac­cusation, which was a complete fabrication, was an extreme expression of official Soviet anti-Semitism.¹¹⁴ In 1943 all Jews began to be systematically removed from the army's political apparatus and replaced by Russians. After the war the same policy was applied to Jews who held command posts.

The flames of anti-Semitism, ignited by the Nazis in the occupied ter­ritories, were further fanned by the authorities after those areas were lib­erated. In the Soviet army and in the rear, rumors intentionally were spread about cowardice and desertion on the part of Jews. Those who miraculously escaped mass extermination by the Nazis often were accused by the Soviet authorities of having been agents of the Germans; otherwise, how could they have survived? After the war Soviet Jews began to be depicted as agents of "American imperialism."

The campaign to rid Soviet society of "antipatriotic" elements began a few months after a speech by Stalin at a gathering of voters on February 9, 1946. He did not make any special references to socialism or com­munism; instead, the state, the Soviet social system, and the greatness of "the motherland" were the main themes of his speech.¹¹⁵

On June 28, 1946, Culture and Life, a new party publication, appeared. It was to be issued every ten days by the Central Committee's Directorate of Agitation and Propaganda, "Agitprop." Agitprop had been simply a department (otdel) of the Central Committee; the fact that it had been transformed into a "directorate" (upravlenie) indicated that the role of ide­ology in the party-government system was being reinforced. Soon a far- reaching offensive began against "ideological deviations" in all fields of science and culture.

The party's control was particularly strict over literature and history, which had a tremendous influence in the shaping of individual personality. This was particularly true in Russia, where reading was a mass phenom­enon. It is likely that all prewar generations were raised on the Russian classics, and the literary tastes of the majority were therefore firmly con­servative, despite the many attempts to create a new proletarian culture, with such works as Gladkov's Cement and Serafimovich's Iron Flood. The party leadership finally understood that its best interest lay in maintaining the people's conservative tastes and encouraging those young writers who followed classical models, albeit with new content that glorified the revo­lution, socialism, and Soviet patriotism. After the war a novel by one of these writers, The Young Guard, by Aleksandr Fadeev, described the Young Communist heroes who had resisted German occupation in the mining town of Krasnodon. These Young Communists were fully in the tradition of the classical heroes of Soviet literature. However, Fadeev, the secretary of the Writers Union and a Central Committee member, "had forgotten" to stress the party's leading role in organizing the anti-Nazi resistance. Thus in 1947 he became the target of party criticism. As a true son of the party, and under its guidance, he rewrote the novel, making it much worse.

The war provided a new generation of heroes—authentic for the most part—who appeared in the works of such writers as Vasily Grossman, Viktor Nekrasov, Boris Polevoi, and Konstantin Simonov. The war became the principal theme of Soviet literature for many years.

But there was a need for a new kind of hero, a shining example for the period of reconstruction and socialist emulation. He was born in the form of the Cavalier of the Golden Star, a novel by Semen Babaevsky. This book, and others like it, were printed in the millions. Critics praised them, and the authors received the Stalin prize. But readers shied away from them; they were too primitive and full of lies.

At the same time a new danger appeared, presented by a young generation of writers and poets who had matured and become seasoned by their wartime experience. They sought to rethink the world in which they lived. In the eyes of the party, however, any such rethinking was sedition of the worst kind. "New winds" were blowing in all areas of cultural life. The party ideologists, who saw in this trend an erosion of ideology and, consequently, harm to the Soviet regime, rose to meet this danger. The party launched a campaign that did not overlook any field of cultural endeavor. Volunteers willing to judge and condemn their colleagues were found everywhere. With a zeal as great as their lack of talent, they were then and are still the party's main reserve force. The party had only to give the signal and point out the channel down which the streams of mud were to flow, and the rest took care of itself.

Initially, from 1946 to 1948, this ideological campaign was headed by Zhdanov, a secretary of the Central Committee. After his death it was headed by Mikhail Suslov, also a secretary of the Central Committee. Unlike Zhdanov, who loved to show off in front of huge auditoriums, Suslov pre­ferred to operate from behind the scene, letting his subordinates do the dirty work.

In his speeches of 1946—1948, Zhdanov demanded that the influence of Western culture be totally rooted out. Whether he spoke to the Leningrad writers, philosophers, or composers, he insisted on emphatic condemnation of all deviations from Marxism-Leninism and from the party's cultural line. He was very shrewd in his choice of targets for destructive criticism. In literature he attacked Mikhail Zoshchenko, whose satires were very popular among all strata of the population. In one of Zoshchenko's works, Adventures of a Monkey, a primate escaped from the zoo, lived under normal Soviet conditions, and reached the conclusion that there was no difference between the two types of existence.¹¹⁶ Zhdanov denounced Zoshchenko for this.¹¹⁷ His second victim was a poet very respected and dear to the Russian intelligentsia, Anna Akhmatova. In music, Dmitry Shostakovich was at­tacked. As a rule party leaders selected the most talented representatives of the arts for defamation; independent talent has always presented and will ever present a threat to any totalitarian regime, and the Soviet regime is no exception.

In August 1946 the leadership of the Soviet Writers' Union was changed on orders from the party's Central Committee. Fadeev replaced Tikhonov as secretary general of the union; Tikhonov became a mere undersecretary, as were three newcomers, Vishnevsky, Korneichuk, and Simonov. That same month the Central Committee passed decrees denouncing the mag­azines Zvezda (Star) and Leningrad and the repertories of Soviet theaters, and in September denounced the film A Great Life.

Similar ideological campaigns were soon orchestrated in the republics and regions. The leaderships of the Writers' Union and other professional associations such as the Composers' Union were now obliged to do what previously the local party organizations alone had done—to watch over the ideological state of affairs in their respective fields and to give timely warnings of any deviations. Special plenary sessions were conducted both in Moscow and locally.

During one of these sessions, a plenum of the Writers' Union in Moscow in December 1948, the secretaries of the local unions engaged in "self- criticism." They repented their sins: idealizing the past of their respective nationalities; forgetting the class struggle; lacking the skill to create works on socialist construction; and lastly, failing to monitor the work of other writers. The representatives of the union's leadership, Simonov, Gorbatov, and Surkov, also pointed to other "negative phenomena," such as formalism, aestheticism, bourgeois liberalism, the inability to use the method of so­cialist realism, and being under the influence of Western writers. Kazakh writers were accused of not being able to distinguish between the oppressive nature of tsarism and the liberating role of Soviet Russia.¹¹⁸ These obviously political charges marked the opening of a campaign against the folk epics of the Central Asian nationalities, especially those descended from the Mongols. This campaign reached its zenith in 1951.¹¹⁹

At the 1948 Writers' Union plenum, Shcherbina, the vice-minister of culture, and Bolshakov, minister of cinematography, explained to the writers what was expected of them: glorification of the heroic labor of the workers, collective farmers, and intellectuals. In accordance with the Central Com­mittee's directives, it was explained that writers could make fun of every­thing that is "not part of our concept of morality and the Soviet way of life," in particular, it was all right to ridicule "kowtowing to bourgeois culture." Special attention was to be directed to the necessity of combatting American culture. As an example, Shcherbina referred to the American movie The Iron Curtain and called on Soviet filmmakers to answer blow for blow.¹²⁰ Such was soon forthcoming from Ilya Ehrenburg, who was always in the right place at the right time. In an article in Culture and Life he denounced the film using the full range of unflattering epithets so typical of the style of the Stalin era.¹²¹

The Soviet Composers' Union experienced pretty much the same things. Its head, Tikhon Khrennikov, was notorious for having been able to adapt, like Mikoyan, to every official twist and turn. This time Sergei Prokofiev was subject to an attack. The desperate Prokofiev recanted in a letter to the Central Committee. Khachaturian, Muradeli, and Myaskovsky were also attacked for being "sluggish" about reorienting themselves; on the other hand, Shostakovich was praised ever so slightly for his musical score for the film version of Fadeev's revised Young Guard.¹²² But although the composers voted docilely in favor of any condemnation and denunciation they were asked to, their works continued to be somewhat out of harmony with "the glorious achievements of the Soviet people." This was their way of resisting the government.

During the first half of 1949 the war against "rootless cosmopolitans" reached its height. No field was spared. Pravda added fuel to the fire by publishing an editorial condemning an "antipatriotic" group of theater crit­ics. ¹²³ The editorial differed from other press commentary directed against "cosmopolitans" in its exceptional vulgarity, boorishness and insolence, undisguised anti-Semitism, and—what is of no less importance—the charges it leveled at the "rootless cosmopolitans." According to Soviet law these charges could be interpreted as premeditated crimes. Soon afterward Si- mono v, at a meeting of Moscow critics, revealed the conspiratorial nature of the "rootless cosmopolitans."¹²⁴

Others, such as Anatoly Sofronov, echoed these attacks. He accused the drama critics of having taken lessons from clandestine anti-Soviet orga­nizations. Some of the victims in desperation denounced themselves, con­fessing to a desire to hurt the image of Soviet drama, deliberately conspiring for that purpose, and so on. Writers' real names were printed alongside their pseudonyms to eliminate any shadow of doubt concerning their Jewish origins. This method had been widely used in Nazi Germany.

One of the results of the war against Germany was intensified repression against various nationalities in the border regions of the Soviet Union. The mass deportations of Caucasian peoples and Crimean Tatars in 1943—44 were followed after the war by new deportations of Baits, Greeks, and Turks. Plans were made to deport the Abkhazians, but they were not carried out.

Further, a reassessment of the national liberation struggles by non-Russian nationalities within the tsarist empire was also begun. In 1947 a discussion arose about the character of the resistance movement led by Shamil in the Caucasus in the first half of the nineteenth century.¹²⁵ The discussion originated in the recesses of the USSR Academy of Science's Institute of History, but it gradually developed into an ideological crusade against the

orthodox Marxist point of view, according to which Shamil's struggle had been progressive. At the end of the discussion, which lasted for nearly five years, Shamil was branded an agent of British intelligence and his move­ment was pronounced reactionary. This reassessment of tsarist colonial policy in the Caucasus, and later, in Central Asia, led to the conclusion that virtually all anticolonial movements in territories seized by tsarist Russia had been reactionary. At the same time, the national epics of these peoples were proclaimed reactionary as well. An entire group of historians and literary critics in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Kirghizia, Yakutia, and Dagestan were expelled from the party, removed from their jobs, and stripped of their academic degrees; some were even arrested.¹²⁶

The discussion gradually transformed into an ideological pogrom, which rapidly assumed an anti-Semitic taint. Academician I. I. Mints and his students were accused of cosmopolitanism and "wrecking," although it would have been hard to find a historian more devoted to the party than Mints. Throughout his scholarly career he was in the foremost ranks of party ideological forces, and his contribution to the falsification of the history of the USSR was by no means insignificant. The campaign against cosmopolitanism, against "bourgeois objectivism," the "whitewashing of American imperialism," and so forth, continued through almost all of the postwar years, nearly until Stalin's death in March 1953.

Similar campaigns were launched among philosophers, economists, legal specialists, linguists, and literary historians. One of the most glaring ex­amples was the persecution of Academician Evgeny Varga, director of the USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of World Economy. For decades he had been among the highest party and Comintern authorities on world economic matters. An orthodox Marxist, he had always predicted the decay of the capitalist economy, each crisis being followed by a worse one. He defended the Marxist thesis of the absolute and relative impoverishment of the working class under capitalism. But the new world economic situation which had come about after World War II forced Varga to examine his position. He published a book on the changes which had affected the capitalist economy after the war and spoke of the possibility that these changes might enable the capitalist system to survive a new crisis. Varga was accused of deviation from Marxism-Leninism and was relieved of his duties as director of the institute. The institute was reorganized. Some of Varga's colleagues were forced from their jobs, and some persecuted; several people were arrested. At a meeting of the institute, Varga was publicly denounced, having "the blood of the Russian people" on his hands. This was said about a man whose only son had been killed in the war. Varga's was not an isolated case. At Moscow University in 1947—1949 the perse­cution of scholars and scientists took on a mass character. Often students as well as faculty members participated in the humiliation of professors.

THE EMPIRE OF THE CAMPS

In the early 1940s the overwhelming majority of those arrested during the previous decade had already died, and the NKVD was facing labor shortages at a time when there were many production plans to meet. They did not have to wait long to replenish their labor supply. At the end of the war and afterward, many new categories of prisoners appeared: soldiers from Vla­sov's army, members of nationalist formations who had fought on the German side, Soviet workers who had been taken to Germany (they were called ostovtsy, from the German word Ostarbeiter—"Eastern worker"), former Soviet prisoners of war, and so-called enemy elements from the Baltic nations, Poland, East Germany, Romania, and Hungary. (The Soviet Union generously agreed to organize an all-socialist-countries penal servitude system [katorga] on its territory.)

Among the detained were many German and Japanese prisoners of war who had simply been transferred from the prisoner of war camps to the labor camps. Their crimes had been to make "anti-Soviet" statements— that is, they had complained about prison conditions, such as denial of permission to correspond with their families. Also sent to the camps were Soviet citizens who had nurtured unrealistic hopes of improvement and relaxation of the Stalinist regime in the wake of the victory over German nazism.

In addition, there was a greater influx of Baptists and members of various other religious persuasions. Their crime consisted in wishing to believe in God in their own fashion and not according to the dogma of the state- approved church and church communities. Also sent to the camps were those who had "conspired" in the anti-Soviet plots newly invented by the KGB. If there really had been as many conspirators as were found in the camps, Soviet power would hardly have survived.

The last category of permanent camp and prison inmates consisted of those sentenced for common crimes. The largest category was that of inmates sentenced for collaborating with the enemy during the occupation, among them not only real collaborators but also those who had not actively opposed the Germans. This category totaled up to 3 million, including those who had been soldiers in the German security service (SD) and Gestapo col­laborators, many of them guilty of monstrous crimes. But there were also innocent people, and their numbers were not small.

How many prisoners were there after the war? The figures are contra­dictory. The lowest of the figures suggested by Western scholars (because the USSR has not said a word on the question) is 8 million;¹²⁷ the highest, 15 million.¹²⁸ According to estimates by the British government presented at a session of the UN Economic and Social Council on August 15, 1950, 10 million were performing forced labor.¹²⁹

How many camps were there after the war? Western sources have named 165 camps and groups of camps.¹³⁰ More precisely they might be termed slave empires. Let us comment on some of them.

Abez-Inta, a group of camps in the Komi Autonomous Republic. In 1948 these seven camps held some 14,000 prisoners, half of them arrested on political grounds or on trumped up charges.¹³¹

Osoblag Vaigach (the Vaigach "special camp" was located on Vaigach Island). People given death sentences were forced to work in the lead mines. Between 3,000 and 4,000 people fit this category. Between 1,200 and 1,300 new inmates arrived each year. The annual mortality rate was nearly 50 percent.¹³²

Vorkuta. In 1953 this camp complex held approximately 130,000 in­mates. It was here that one of the most famous prisoner rebellions took place in 1953.¹³³

Potma (in Mordovia), with 40,000 inmates in 1942.¹³⁴ Taishet-Bratsk. Between 25,000 and 30,000 prisoners.¹³⁵ Bamlag (the Baikal-Amur railroad camp complex). Thirty separate camps were located on its vast territory in 1953, containing between 350,000 and 500,000 prisoners.¹³⁶

Sewostlag (the Northeast camp complex), whose center was the city of Magadan. This group of camps had a radius of 1,000 kilometers. It was located in the huge expanse between Yakutsk, the Bay of Nagaev, and the mouth of the Kolyma River. Data for 1940 show that it held more than 3 million prisoners; other sources put the number up to 5 million.¹³⁷

Karlag (a complex near Karaganda). According to information for 1941, it contained as many as 100,000 prisoners. In the summer 350 branches of the camp operated, but the number dropped to 180 in the winter. It covered nearly 1.5 million hectares of land, 500,000 of which were cul­tivated. The empire had 250,000 head of livestock. The Karlag complex was sometimes described as a "vacation resort," because it included a special camp for handicapped inmates, at Spassk.¹³⁸

Conditions for camp inmates were particularly severe in 1946—1948 and in 1950. The majority of them had been put in the camps following German captivity or debilitating labor in German factories. Sapped of their physical strength, they never produced more than 40 percent of the quotas stipulated for the Soviet camps.¹³⁹ Such failure was punishable by reduced food ra­tions, which in turn led to death.

In 1950, upon orders from the Main Directorate of the Corrective Labor Camps, the Gulag, mass executions took place in all camps: according to directives, 5 percent of all inmates were to be eliminated.¹⁴⁰ The country needed coal, uranium, tungsten, gold, platinum, and timber, however, and the labor force had been manifestly reduced as a result of war. Consequently a new order was issued to exploit the prisoners more profitably, improving their nutrition and living conditions to keep them from dropping like flies. In 1950 the average ration for those in the camps who met their work quotas was 800 grams of bread, 20 of fat, 120 of semolina, 30 of meat or 75 of fish, and 27 of sugar. Only bread was issued directly to prisoners; the rest went straight to the camp kitchen for the preparation of hot meals (two a day, morning and evening).¹⁴¹ To get an idea of the horrible situation of these people even after conditions had been improved, suffice it to say that they were awakened at 4 am and "lights out" was at 10 pm. The workday lasted ten to twelve hours, not counting the time spent going from camp to worksite and back.¹⁴² Those who did not meet their quotas were allotted only 400 grams of bread daily and thin soup twice a day. Inmates being punished were given only 200 grams of bread.¹⁴³

To encourage "shock workers," they were given a bonus of 10 rubles and tobacco. The prisoner could use this money to buy food in the camp commissary. But what could he buy with 10 or 20 rubles per month?¹⁴⁴ During those years, the Soviet press often spoke of the exploitation of blacks by whites in South Africa and indignantly referred to the fact that the salaries of black workers were four to eight times lower than those of their white counterparts. The Soviet prisoner, the zek, doing hard labor earned twenty to thirty times less than a free Soviet worker. It might be argued that these were criminals. Indeed, there were criminals among them, but they constituted only about 25 percent of the cases. The majority, besides the "politicals," were workers, men and women sentenced for such offenses as arriving twenty minutes late to work, being absent without a valid excuse, or committing petty larceny (stealing a piece of bread, for example), or for collecting grain left lying in the field after the harvest.

In the Nazi camps, an indelible tattoo was made on each victim's arm: his number. Prisoners were also marked in Soviet camps; they had to wear a number on their clothing.

In 1948 "special regime" camps were created for "Vlasovites" and others who had collaborated with the Germans, and of course for counterrevolu­tionaries. Conditions there were much harsher than in the regular corrective labor camps. Baptists too—martyrs of their faith—were sent: between 1948 and 1950 belonging to a Baptist community could mean twenty to twenty- five years in a camp.¹⁴⁵

The prisoners' moral situation was atrocious. Besides the humiliation of wearing a number and having barred windows in their barracks, they were subject to the ill temper of the guards, who often opened fire without warning.¹⁴⁶ In the special camps the censors, (MVD officials), too lazy to inspect letters addressed to the inmates, simply burned them.¹⁴⁷

Nevertheless, the war substantially transformed the camp population's state of mind. They were now filled with people who had fought for or against the Soviet government. The majority of them had already borne arms and knew how to use them. They could defend themselves from the pressures of common criminals, who were the camp administration's guards and who were especially deployed against the "enemies of the people." Common criminals were officially called "the socially close" (that is, to the Soviet regime, to be distinguished from the "socially dangerous," those who had been sentenced for "counterrevolutionary activity"). The new in­mates had different life experiences than did the "enemies of the people." They had not been stupefied by propaganda about the alleged building of socialism. Those imprisoned during the 1930s, especially the former party and government officials, considered their arrests to be cases of misun­derstanding, of governmental error. The newcomers cared not one bit about building communism. They despised the system, which in their eyes was no better than the Nazi regime. The Nazis at least hadn't butchered their own people, only others. This hatred was simmering, ready to blow up at any time.

According to information that is far from complete, rebellions took place in the following camps in the years after the war: 1946, Kolyma; 1947, Ust-Vym (Komi ASSR), Dzhezkazgan (Karaganda); 1950, Salekhard, Taishet; 1951, Dzhezkazgan; 1952, Vozhel (Komi), Molotov, Krasnoyarsk region; 1953, Vorkuta, Norilsk, Karaganda, Kolyma; 1954, Revda (Sverdlovsk), Karabash (in the Urals), Taishet, Reshoty, Dzhezkazgan, Kengir, Sherubai Nura, Balkhash, Sakhalin; 1955, Vorkuta, Solikamsk, Potma.¹⁴⁸

During Stalin's last years, the special camps, instituted in 1948, became the centers of political resistance. It was there that prisoners sentenced under article 58 of the penal code were sent, for "anti-Soviet" or "coun­terrevolutionary" activity. The idea was advancing slowly that unity was needed to obtain their rights.¹⁴⁹ The prisoners began by eliminating the informers and then went on to defend their comrades whom the adminis­tration wanted to transfer for misconduct. Strikes, protests, and armed revolts began to break out in the camps in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The ball was rolling. "And we, liberated from indecency, freed from sur­veillance and eavesdropping, turned around with our eyes wide open and saw... that there were thousands of us! That we were political. And that we could resist!" wrote Solzhenitsyn.

In the Vorkuta camps, small underground groups constituting a veritable "resistance" movement sprang up. 'The existence of numerous clandestine organizations in the special Vorkuta camps and their activities," wrote a veteran of that camp, "were perhaps the most astonishing phenomenon of all for the Europeans." (The writer, Joseph Schomler, was a German pris­oner, one of many allowed to return to the West after Stalin's death. ¹⁵°)

The head of one resistance group described by Schomler was a former Soviet officer who had been a prisoner of the Germans and who was sen­tenced, after repatriation, to ten years in the camps. His group consisted of former Red Army officers. They perceived their liberation to be contin­gent upon a war between the USSR and the Western powers, and they were preparing for the decisive moment when, as in 1941, the camp authorities would start preventive executions of prisoners. The overwhelming majority of the participants supported the social and economic principles of the Soviet system, but opposed the dictatorship and wanted reforms in agri­culture. The most indomitable were the OUN members from the Western Ukraine.

The prison authorities zealously fanned national conflicts and antago­nisms and encouraged anti-Semitism. For example, Ukrainians from Ger­man auxiliary forces who hunted and murdered Jews during the war were designated foremen in brigades that included Jewish prisoners.¹⁵¹ Schomler reported the following conversation with a certain Katchenko.

When I asked him why he had been arrested, he answered:

"I killed eighty-four Jews."

"By yourself?"

"Yes, with my own revolver. And they gave me twenty-five years for that.

It isn't fair, is it?"

"During the war," Schomler continued, "such creatures had all worked either for the Sicherheitsdienst or the Gestapo. Now they are mostly in privileged positions working for the NKVD. Katchenko, for example, was in charge of one of the building projects in the town."¹⁵²

Everywhere the causes of the strikes and revolts were the same: the trampling of human dignity, persecution by the prison authorities, murders of inmates by the guards. Gradually, the spontaneous protest movements took on a political character.

The revolt in the Pechora camp in 1948 was led by Boris Mekhtiev, a former colonel in the Soviet army. The insurgents' plan was to liberate the camps one at a time and then capture the city of Vorkuta. However, the insurgents were intercepted by fighter planes a hundred kilometers from the city and dispersed. Some of them went in small groups to the Ural mountains to become partisans. Mekhtiev was captured and sentenced to twenty-five years' imprisonment.¹⁵³

That same year, a revolt took place at Construction Site No. 501 during work on the Sivaya Maska— Salekhard Railway, led by a former colonel named Voronin (or Voronov?) and Sakurenko, a former lieutenant in an armored tank division.¹⁵⁴ A second insurrection, in 1950 was led by one Belyaev, a former general who had been sentenced to twenty-five years for "counterrevolutionary" activity.¹⁵⁵ An insurrection also took place at Kengir in 1954. It lasted forty-two days and was led by a former colonel named Kuznetsov.¹⁵⁶ In all probability, former military personnel from the Nizhni Aturyakh division also led the Berlag revolt.¹⁵⁷

The outbreaks by inmates of the camps had more and more clearly defined objectives. The Salekhard insurgents under the command of Colonel Vo­ronin liberated not only their "brigade" but others as well. They opened the gates of the camp compound, took the neighboring camp by assault, and began a march on Vorkuta, some fifty kilometers away.¹⁵⁸ What were their objectives? According to certain sources, the insurgents wanted to capture the radio station and call on the civilized world for help and on the inmates in other camps to rise up.¹⁵⁹

In January 1952 a strike broke out in Ekibastuz which soon grew into an uprising. For the first time in the history of the Soviet camps, several thousand inmates joined efforts to protest the senseless murder of one of their comrades by a guard. They refused to work and went on a hunger strike for three days. The strike terrified the Gulag authorities. A com­mission was sent to the camp, supposedly to investigate the complaints. The prisoners courageously presented their claims and demands.¹⁶⁰ After the commission left, arrests and transfers to other camps began. Many were sent to the Kengir camp, where they were forced to work wearing handcuffs.

Agitation became particularly widespread in the camps after Stalin's death and Beria's elimination, that is, during the spring and summer of 1953 and again in 1954. At this time the movement began to take on an openly political character.

CRISIS IN THE REGIME

One of the most glaring signs of the crisis the regime faced at the end of the Stalin era was the intensifying power struggle among Stalin's closest associates. After the war, and to a large degree because of Stalin's poor health, the Politburo began to splinter into several rival groups. Gradually Stalin's former close associates, those who had helped him rise to power after Lenin's death and during collectivization, were pushed into the back­ground. Younger and more ambitious men took their places—Zhdanov, Malenkov, Beria, and Nikolai Voznesensky.

The Zdhanov grouping dealt the cards during the first two years after the war. The group's influence derived from the key economic posts it held. It consisted of Voznesensky, president of the State Planning Commission and a Politburo member, Aleksei Kosygin, an alternate member of the Politburo, Aleksei A. Kuznetsov, Central Committee secretary in charge of party control over the army and the state security agencies, and lastly, Zhdanov himself, a Central Committee secretary in charge of policy and ideology, and the group's driving force. Stalin gave Zhdanov the most crucial assignments. It was Zhdanov who inspired and led the campaign for the "ideological" purification of Soviet society and the campaign to establish the "primacy" of Soviet science. He also headed the struggle against her­etics (such as Tito) in the international Communist movement. For a while his influence on Stalin was exceptional. The dictator even urged his daugh­ter, Svetlana, to marry Zhdanov's son. Zhdanov was also the instigator of a new policy aimed at strengthening the party by luring intellectuals and veterans of the war against Germany into its ranks.

Zhdanov's relentlessness and aggressiveness, however, wore out with time. The ambitions of his group were frustrated by Zhdanov's death in August 1948, after which Georgy Malenkov's star began to rise. A careful and intelligent operator, Malenkov in fact directed the Central Commitee apparatus, which he had helped to organize.

For several years Malenkov had served in Stalin's personal secretariat, which was led by Poskrebyshev. There he had mastered the arts of party apparatus intrigue, which makes Machiavellianism look like child's play. He rose during the terror of the 1930s, and in 1939, at the age of thirty- seven, became a Central Committee secretary and member of the Orgburo in charge of party personnel. He had the support of Beria, who came to Moscow in 1939. Formerly a secretary of the Georgian Central Committee, Beria was named commissar of internal affairs when Ezhov was removed.

Malenkov and Beria formed a bloc and worked together. Both of them became members of the Politburo in 1946.

Stalin adroitly manipulated the rival groupings, now advancing one, now pushing it back, without ever letting go of the reins of power himself. In reserve he kept Nikita Khrushchev, whom he trusted because he did not consider him a pretender to the throne.

Both rival groups, for their part, tried to use Stalin's suspicions and mistrust to consolidate their own positions. Zhdanov took advantage of the conflict with Yugoslavia to incite a pathological hatred of Tito in Stalin. In 1947 Zhdanov's rise led to the temporary eclipse of Malenkov, who was sent to Uzbekistan and was replaced for a short time by Aleksei Kuznetsov, a former secretary of the Leningrad provincial party committee. Malenkov returned to Moscow after Zhdanov's death. Along with Beria he fabricated the "Leningrad affair," in which the Leningrad grouping was accused of trying to seize power in order to stifle the influence of the Zhdanov group once and for all. Voznesensky, Kuznetsov, N. N. Rodionov, the chairman of the council of Ministers of the RSFSR, and many other ranking state and party officials originally from Leningrad were accused of antiparty and antistate activities and destroyed. In the ensuing witchhunt in Leningrad itself, hundreds upon hundreds of people were victimized.

According to Khrushchev's account, the strengthening of the Malenkov— Beria group caused Stalin himself some alarm. In the years 1947—1949 Stalin had several strokes. He became more acutely mistrustful and sus­picious. In 1949 he summoned Khrushchev from Kiev and named him secretary of the Moscow party committee and a secretary of the Central Committee, probably hoping in this way to balance the forces in the Po­litburo and to use Khrushchev to conduct the upcoming purge. Stalin's old cohorts, Molotov, Voroshilov, Andreev, and Mikoyan receded more and more into the background. In 1949 Vyshinsky replaced Molotov as minister of foreign affairs, although Molotov did remain as deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers. Voroshilov and Andreev had been mere fig­ureheads for a long time. Other Politburo members continued to carry out their respective duties, while taking great care not to be kicked off the team. In the last years of his life Stalin began to believe, or pretended to believe, that Voroshilov was a British agent and Molotov an American one.¹⁶¹ Molotov's wife was arrested, which did not stop Molotov from continuing to serve Stalin with utter loyalty.

Malenkov and Beria, seeking to clear the road to power, began to rid themselves of all secondary figures who occupied important posts in the party but upon whom they could not rely. They did this by skillfully ex­ploiting Stalin's fears. He saw plots everywhere. It was thus that a number of prominent figures were arrested, among them A. I. Shakhurin, minister of the aeronautic industry, A. A. Novikov, a marshal of the air force, N. D. Yakovlev, marshal of the artillery, Academician Grigoriev, and Academician Ivan Maisky, a former ambassador to London.¹⁶²

Stalin was afflicted more and more by paranoia, the occupational disease of tyrants. Secondary figures, mainly in the state security service, used him to further their own careers, for example, S. D. Ignatiev, who was minister of state security during Stalin's last few years. Growing numbers of people were being accused of counterrevolutionary and conspiratorial activities. The political atmosphere was reminiscent of the period just before the terror of the 1930s.

The idea that a new purge was necessary steadily ripened in Stalin's mind. His intention to carry out a "changing of the guard" became evident when a party congress was finally held, thirteen years after the Eighteenth Congress: the Nineteenth Party Congress, October 5—15, 1952.

The congress established a new body to replace the Politburo and the Orgburo, to be called the Presidium of the Central Committee and consisting of twenty-five full members and eleven alternates. Sitting on this new body were ten Central Committee secretaries, thirteen deputies to the chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, the first secretaries of the Central Com­mittees of the Byelorussian and Ukrainian Communist parties, the minister of state security, the foreign minister, and leaders of the trade unions, the Communist youth organization, and the party's control commission. In effect this meant that there was a replacement at hand for each of the old Politburo members. Stalin's intention to remove the entire old leadership could not have been clearer. The Central Committee was significantly enlarged, but more than 60 percent of the outgoing Central Committee was reelected.¹⁶³ This indicated that the process of forming a stable power elite was close to completion. The regional party secretaries, who in 1952 constituted half of the Central Committee (at the Eighteenth Congress they represented only one-fifth), had become the backbone of the party and state apparatus. Their role in deciding leadership questions would soon grow immensely.

The congress stressed the Soviet nationwide character of the party. Its name was changed from the Ail-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In both names the idea of one state was predominant. As for the dropping of the old name "Bolshevik," almost all Mensheviks, with the exception of those who had fled abroad, had been destroyed. The same was true of the Bolsheviks. Thus the word no longer served any purpose. While preparing for a major purge in the Soviet Union, Stalin ordered one in the satellite countries. Everywhere—in Bulgaria,

Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania—trials were staged of Communist leaders who, according to Moscow, were too independent or else contaminated by "Titoism." Bulgarian and Czechoslovakian Commu­nists were tortured in the presence of Soviet advisers. All except the Bul­garian Troicho Kostov confessed to having links with Zionism, U.S. imperialism, and Yugoslav intelligence. They were either executed or sen­tenced to long prison terms. In Poland and East Germany arrests also took place, but no executions.

The struggle against imaginary plotters became Stalin's main preoccu­pation. He told Khrushchev, who had been recently called from Kiev:

We need you here. Things aren't going very well. Plots have been uncovered. You are to take charge of the Moscow organization so that the Central Committee can be sure to count on the local party structure for support in the struggle against the conspirators. So far, we've exposed a conspiracy in Leningrad, and Moscow, too, is teeming with antiparty elements. We want to make the city a bastion for the Central Committee.¹⁶⁴

A "conspiracy" was soon discovered at the Stalin (now Likhachev) Au­tomobile Factory in Moscow. The talented chief designer Feinzimmer and a group of Jewish employees were accused of sabotage on behalf of the Zionists and the United States.¹⁶⁵ Malenkov named a former investigator from the party control commission to the post of Central Committee party organizer at the factory.

Soviet foreign policy failures in Korea, Berlin, and Yugoslavia and do­mestic economic difficulties led Stalin to reapply an already tested method for combatting the growing discontent among the population: whipping up national hysteria, especially anti-Semitism. Manifestations of Stalin's anti- Semitic attitude had appeared on numerous occasions since the time of his struggle for power. Many of his political opponents were of Jewish origin. Anti-Semitism had increased in the USSR, mainly in the southern regions, under the impact of Soviet—Nazi friendship in 1939-1941 and during the Nazi occupation. Stalin's anti-Semitism was also intensified by U.S.—Soviet antagonism and U.S. support to the Jewish victims of genocide and the Zionists who were establishing the state of Israel.

The new leadership in the Ukraine installed when Khrushchev was trans­ferred to Moscow—L. G. Melnikov, first secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee, and Korotchenko, chairman of the Ukrainian Council of Min­isters—initiated openly anti-Semitic policies in that republic.¹⁶⁶ The news­papers were filled with Jewish names, people accused of all sorts of mistakes, crimes, and sins. Jews were arrested, forced from their jobs, insulted, and beaten in the streets. Cases of pogroms were reported in Kiev, Kharkov, and elsewhere in the Ukraine. Secret quotas were set limiting employment for Jews as well as access to higher education.

Anti-Semitism was also building in other parts of the country. In Moscow, Stalin himself ordered Khrushchev to organize a pogrom at the Thirtieth Aviation Factory, where there was discontent over working conditions. He suggested that clubs be distributed to the workers to beat up the Jews after work.¹⁶⁷

In his memoirs, Khrushchev bears witness to Stalin's openly anti-Semitic statements at Politburo meetings. It was not even beyond him to imitate a Jewish accent,¹⁶⁸ fully aware that none of the Politburo members would dare to criticize or even mention his anti-Semitism. Stalin's anti-Semitism became more evident with the affair of the Jewish Antifascist Committee.

The committee, created during the war, had tried to organize financial and material aid for the Soviet Union through Jewish organizations in the United States and to distribute anti-Nazi, pro-Soviet propaganda. Led by Solomon Lozovsky, head of Informburo and a member of the Central Com­mittee, and Solomon Mikhoels, a famous Jewish actor, the committee in­cluded several prominent personalities of Jewish origin who were active in the Soviet cultural world. In 1943, Mikhoels and the poet Isaak Fefer had been sent to the United States for several months, to mobilize public opinion and raise funds. The tour had been a major success for the Soviet Union.¹⁶⁹

In 1944 the Antifascist Committee sent Stalin a letter asking that an autonomous Jewish republic be established in the Crimea, which had been partly depopulated because of the deportation of the Tatars.¹⁷⁰ Stalin later presented this letter as a Zionist attempt to create a bulwark of American imperialism on Soviet territory. In 1948 the committee's members were arrested on Stalin's instructions. They were tortured and in 1952 were shot, including Lozovsky. Before their arrest, Mikhoels had been murdered— on January 13, 1948, on a street in Minsk, by state security agents. After the killing, a truck was driven over his corpse to give the impression it had been an accident. 'They killed him like beasts," wrote Khrushchev.¹⁷¹ Mikhoels's remains were transferred to Moscow, where a solemn funeral was arranged.

More or less at the same time, the secret police began to prepare an attempt on the life of Maxim Litvinov, the former people's commissar of foreign affairs. The crime was ordered by Stalin himself, who suspected Litvinov of collaborating with the United States. But Litvinov died of natural causes in 1951.

The last anti-Semitic provocation, which was not carried out because Stalin died, was the so-called doctors' plot. The affair came about at the initiative of ranking officials of the Ministry of State Security, who were fully aware of Stalin's anti-Semitism and were interpreting his wishes. Among those arrested were prominent Kremlin physicians whose patients were Stalin and other top party and army officials. The doctors included Professor Miron Vovsy, Mikhoels's brother, and Professor Egorov, a head of the medical department of the Kremlin. As a pretext an accusation was drafted by Lidiya Timashuk, a radiologist at the Kremlin hospital, who was a secret police informer. Under atrocious tortures, the accused doctors confessed to having taken part in a plot to murder army, party, and gov­ernment leaders through the conscious use of incorrect medical treatment. The accusations were so unbelievable that even Abakumov, the seasoned minister of state security, expressed doubts about the "confessions" signed by the unfortunate doctors. The case was reported to Stalin, who ordered that it be prosecuted and that the arrested men be beaten until full confes­sions were extracted. On January 13, 1953, the newspapers carried stories about the discovery of a plot by Jewish physicians and their impending trial.¹⁷² A week later, on the anniversary of Lenin's death, the provocateur Timashuk was awarded the Order of Lenin.¹⁷³ Meetings were organized all over the country to express outrage and denounce the "doctor-murderers." In this orgy of anti-Semitism, writers, scientists, and other figures from the Soviet cultural world did what they could to contribute to this orgy. Liter- aturnaya gazeta, whose chief editor was Konstantin Simonov, published a vicious article entitled "Murderers in White Coats."¹⁷⁴ At the party meeting in the presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences, respectable acade­micians demanded the death penalty for the doctors.¹⁷⁵ The reactions of the common people were more direct: Jews were insulted, attacked, and often beaten. Patients refused to accept treatment from Jewish doctors, contending that they would be poisoned; some put their denunciations in writing. Many Jewish doctors were chased out of hospitals and clinics. Personnel departments in institutions began to compile lists of Jewish employees.

Stalin was personally in charge of the "doctors' plot." His scenario consisted of several acts: Act One, sentencing after full confessions; Act Two, execution by hanging (it is said that this execution would have taken place in Red Square, in Moscow, as in days of yore); Act Three, pogroms throughout the country; Act Four, Jewish personalities from the world of culture would turn to Stalin, asking that he protect the Jews from pogroms and give them permission to leave the big cities and go back to the land; Act Five, mass deportation of Jews, "at their own request," to the country's eastern territories. The philosopher D. Chesnokov, a member of the Pre­sidium of the Central Committee, had written a book explaining the reasons for the deportation of the Jews. The book had been printed, and the signal was being awaited for its distribution to top party and government circles. As for the appeal by the country's leading Jews, not only had it been written: it had already been signed.

The country lived in anticipation of a new wave of terror such as it had never seen. Where would it have led? This is a key point in Stalin's biography. Success in the implementation of this great design would have been the crowning achievement of the Leader's career.

Stalin's assessment of the world situation led him to the conclusion that the beginning of the 1950s was the most favorable moment for dealing a final blow to capitalist Europe and implanting the socialist system. Created in 1947, the Cominform, which replaced the Comintern, dissolved in 1943, was to consolidate the forces of the international Communist movement and coordinate the efforts of the Communist parties in a struggle for power. Jules Moch, the French minister of the interior, testified in his memoirs that the French Communist party had plans for taking power in 1947.

The peace movement directed from Moscow was another tool in the consolidation of the Communist movement. The movement enabled the Soviet regime's real intentions to remain hidden, while it lured liberal intellectuals in the West who wanted to defend peace in the world. They were ignorant of the fact that the Soviet government had a different concept of peace than did the Western intelligentsia. Yet their goals were spelled out in the name of the Cominform's publication, For Lasting Peace, for People's Democracy, which was being printed in Belgrade. The idea was simple enough: only people's democracy could bring lasting peace.

The Soviet Union also benefited from the anti-Communist hysteria sweep­ing the United States (McCarthyism), which drove prominent American liberals into the Soviet camp and put many intellectuals who had been critical of the Soviet Union on the spot. They feared being taken as sup­porters of the "cold war" and the McCarthyites.

From 1946 on the USSR was preparing a massive purge, similar to those of the 1930s. The late 1940s and early 1950s were marked by the arrests and trials in the nations of Eastern Europe; the accusations were always the same: spying for the West, plotting, and so forth.

In January 1951, some six months after the beginning of the Korean war, a conference of leaders of the socialist countries was convened in Moscow, at the Kremlin. Stalin and Molotov represented the Soviet Union. Information about the conference proceedings was later produced by Czecho­slovak historians who had access to the secret archives of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist party.¹⁷⁶ These archives con­tained transcripts from the conference, whose climax was Stalin's speech.

The "Leader of Progressive Humanity" explained to the participants that the time was ripe for an offensive against capitalist Europe. Korea had shown the weakness of the U.S. armed forces. The Soviet camp had achieved military superiority over the United States, but this advantage was only temporary; it would last only four years. Thus, the key task of the socialist camp was to mobilize, within three to four years, and consolidate its military, economic, and political forces to deal the decisive blow against Western Europe. The domestic and foreign policies of all the socialist countries were to be subordinated to this end. Stalin stressed that this was a unique opportunity to establish socialism in all of Europe.

After the January 1951 conference, military spending in the USSR and the other socialist countries rose dramatically, particularly unbudgeted spending, in some countries amounting to 40 percent of total spending. The Soviet Union was swiftly completing its hydrogen bomb project.

Stalin's speech at the Nineteenth Party Congress, on October 14, 1952, was the ideological basis for the offensive against Western Europe. This was an unusual speech for Stalin. He addressed himself exclusively to workers abroad and to Communist parties, explaining to them their im­mediate tasks and how to accomplish them. He repeated the word peace endlessly, but this meant he was talking not about peace but something quite different. Stalin was fairly candid, nevertheless. He praised the for­eign Communist parties for their confidence in the Soviet party, that is, for their faithful service, emphasizing that their trust signified their "readiness to support our party in its struggle for a bright future for all peoples."¹⁷⁷ Stalin equated a policy of support for the Soviet Union by the Communist parties with the interests of the people. The concept was crude, but func­tional: whoever supported the Soviet Union was therefore defending the interests of his people. He also praised Thorez and Togliatti, who assured their listeners that the Italians and French would never fight the USSR. For his part, Stalin promised the foreign Communist parties that the CPSU, which "could not remain in debt to the fraternal parties, would in turn render them support."¹⁷⁸ Stalin promised support not only to the Communist parties but also to "people struggling for their liberation."¹⁷⁹ But from whom were these people to be liberated? Fascism had been shattered, and the "new order" in Europe had been destroyed.

Stalin did not give a direct answer. He recalled the "real measures" the Soviet Communist party had implemented to "eliminate capitalist oppres­sion and that of the landowners." These actions had allowed the Soviet Union to become the "shock brigade" of the international workers and the revolutionary movement. Many "shock brigades" had come into being, however, Stalin emphasized, and it had become easier for foreign Com­munists to function than it had been.¹⁸⁰ He predicted that the Communists in capitalist countries would come to power and formulated the slogans under which they should advance. Like Lenin, Stalin was masterful at borrowing the slogans and programs of others and adapting them to the needs of the Soviet regime. This time he borrowed from the bourgeoisie the slogans of defense of democracy, national independence, and sover­eignty. He did not conceal that the slogans were borrowed. Stalin explained that the "banner of democratic liberties" had been thrown overboard¹⁸¹ by the bourgeoisie and that there was no one other than the representatives of Communist and democratic parties to pick it up and carry it. "If you want to rally the majority of people around you,... if you want to become the nation's vanguard," he added significantly.¹⁸² He had no doubt that the program he had outlined would be realized, and "consequently there is every reason to expect success and victory for fraternal parties in the countries where capital rules."¹⁸³

Stalin wanted to see a Soviet Europe in his lifetime. A new war was in the offing. But at this moment History intervened.

STALIN'S DEATH

At the end of February 1953, when preparations for the doctors' trial were in full swing, Stalin suddenly suffered a stroke. He died on March 5.

His closest collaborators breathed a sigh of relief. During the dictator's final years, each one of them had felt himself to be in danger.¹⁸⁴ It seemed that even the all-powerful and omnipotent Beria, long the Politburo member in charge of the Ministries of State Security and Internal Affairs, feared for his life. After 1951 he had virtually lost control over state security, when the former regional party secretary of Bashkiria, S. D. Ignatiev, was named minister of state security. Some thought Ignatiev was a front man for Malenkov; others, for Khrushchev.

A few years after Stalin's death, stories began to circulate, especially in the West, to the effect that his death might have been helped along. Par­ticular stress was placed on the fact that Stalin's death saved Beria from his inevitable demise, for Stalin feared him and was planning to eliminate him. Khrushchev's testimony, according to which Beria expressed joy over Stalin's death, was seen as direct or indirect proof that he had played a part in it. This version, very enticing for a novelist, is not supported by any real evidence. Neither Beria nor the other Politburo members who served the dictator with word and deed had enough courage to do away

with him. Above all, they feared for themselves and were concerned with nothing else; Beria was no exception. Despised by the rest of the Politburo, Beria had to be even more cautious than the rest. Stalin died a natural death.

The coffin with Stalin's corpse lay in state at the House of Trade Unions in Moscow. Four days of mourning were proclaimed (one day less than for Lenin), from March 6 to March 9. Thousands of Soviet citizens paraded in front of Stalin's body. Even he had proved to be a mere mortal, this man of many titles: Leader and Teacher of the Workers of the World; Father of the Peoples; Wise and Intelligent Chief of the Soviet People; the Greatest Genius of All Times and Peoples; the Greatest Military Leader of All Times and Peoples; Coryphaeus of the sciences; Faithful Comrade-in-Arms of Lenin; Devoted Continuor of Lenin's Cause; the Lenin of Today; as well as Mountain Eagle and Best Friend of all Children.

Reactions varied. Those who owed their rise to Stalin feared for their future. Others quietly rejoiced and hoped for a better life.

The newspapers immediately began to glorify the members of the old Politburo. In his article, "At Stalin's Coffin," the poet Aleksei Surkov wrote:

Standing in the honor guard of Stalin's coffin were the members of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the government: comrades Malenkov, Beria, Molotov, Voroshilov, Khrushchev, Bulganin, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan. With proud respect, Soviet citizens looked on as the glorious comrades-in-arms of the great leader paid their last respects to their brilliant mentor.

Our adored chief had placed in those hands, steeled by Herculean labors, the battle flag of the radiant ideas of Lenin and Stalin. He had left to their valiant hearts a precious feeling of responsibility for the fate of the people, for the glorious cause of bringing about communism.¹⁸⁵

These words were far from the truth. The people possessed no "proud admiration" for those comrades-in-arms, nor had their hands been "steeled by Herculean labors." There were, however, hands not cleansed of the blood of compatriots who had been starved and killed in the camps during Stalin's time. There were no courageous hearts, but there were the hearts of those aspiring to power, who were rejoicing over the death of their mentor. Surkov had been right about at least one thing: they had indeed been reared by Stalin.

The struggle for power began even at the dying leader's bedside, when the Politburo members decided who was to keep the vigil by his side. Malenkov and Beria kept vigil together; Khrushchev with Bulganin.¹⁸⁶ The others were left out. Khrushchev was the one to open the March 9 funeral gathering on Red Square, but the speeches were given by the members of the first post-Stalin triumvirate: Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov.¹⁸⁷ Molotov was brought into the team to function as an intermediate link: after Stalin, he was the figure most familiar to the population.

Malenkov became first secretary of the Central Committee and chairman of the Council of Ministers. Beria became minister of internal affairs, and Molotov foreign minister. Khrushchev remained Central Committee sec­retary. In his hands he had concentrated all the visible and invisible power of the party apparatus and was preparing himself for the struggle for power, which was approaching by leaps and bounds.

The day after Stalin died his former "close comrades-in-arms" quickly agreed to rearrange the organization of power created by Stalin at the Nineteenth Party Congress, that is, to remove all newcomers from the leadership. On this question, the members of the old Politburo were 100 percent unanimous. Now the Presidium of the Central Committee was reduced to ten members and four alternates.¹⁸⁸

Stalin's comrades-in-arms feared the reactions of the people, from whom they had been cut off for so long they no longer knew what to expect. For this reason, the government's communiq^ on the reorganization of the Presidium included a sentence to the effect that no "panic or disorder" should be allowed.¹⁸⁹ The only real panic, however, was among the funeral organizers. Because of it, unimaginable chaos developed on the streets of Moscow on the last day Stalin lay in state. Over 500 people were suffocated or trampled to death in the crush. Human blood accompanied the Father of the Peoples to the grave.