On 22 May1 1945, just two weeks after the German surrender, Winston Churchill received a top secret document he had commissioned from the Joint Planning Staff of the British Military Command. Labelled ‘Operation Unthinkable’, the document laid out the plan of attack for a major renewal of hostilities. On the front page, the words ‘Russia: Threat to Western Civilisation’ were written by hand in ink, followed by a bald statement of the plan’s objective: ‘To impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire’. The paper explored the possibility of a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union. ‘A quick success might induce the Russians to submit to our will at least for the time being. But if they want total war, they are in a position to have it … The only way in which we can achieve our object with certainty and lasting results is by victory in a total war.’ Under the headings ‘Decisive Defeat of the Russian Forces’ and ‘Occupation of Vital Areas of Russia’, it discusses the pros and cons of Britain and the US committing to such a ‘total war’. Not surprisingly, the need for secrecy was paramount: ‘Owing to the special need for secrecy,’ it noted, ‘the normal staffs in Service Ministries have not been consulted.’
The offensive never took place. The British generals concluded with typical understatement that an invasion of the Soviet Union would be ‘hazardous’. But the implication was clear: Europe, and to a lesser extent the world, was once again divided, this time between communist and capitalist camps. Pro-Soviet governments were in power in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania. The West had hung on to Greece, but even there its grip was tenuous. Communist movements were gaining ground in Italy and France.
The Soviet Union and the Western Allies had fought together in a coalition of convenience, and once the fascist threat had been defeated, the pre-war suspicion returned. Churchill’s personal distrust of Stalin was clear, but the reasoning behind Operation Unthinkable was based on more than just intuition. In 1945, the size of Soviet forces in Europe was enormous; Stalin had made clear that he would not relinquish the grip Moscow now exerted in the eastern part of the continent, and there was a very real fear that he had designs on the West, that he too might be thinking the unthinkable.
By the end of July, Churchill was out of office. The man who had led Britain to victory had been replaced by the reformist, left-leaning Labour government of Clement Attlee. Churchill did not go quietly. Just as he had railed against the growing Nazi menace in the 1930s, warning against the complacency of the civilised nations, now he turned his Cassandra gaze on the menace of Communism. His speech, ‘The Sinews of Peace’, delivered in Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946, etched an image in the imagination of the world that would define the realities of post-war Europe for the next 40 years:
From Stettin2 in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities lie in what I must call ‘the Soviet sphere’, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence, but to a very high, and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow … The Communist parties have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control … This is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up, nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.
The warning was unambiguous, and Stalin reacted angrily. On 12 March, in an interview in Pravda, he spoke in bellicose terms of Western imperialism’s desire for war, claiming, ‘Mr Churchill and his allies3 resemble Hitler and his allies. They have concluded that the English-speaking nations should rule the world.’ With no access to news or information other than the official state media, all of which were full of Stalin’s pronouncements, the vast majority of Soviet people believed that Britain and America were now warmongers, most probably future enemies. Stalin’s reply to Churchill’s charge of ‘Soviet expansionism’ was one that every Russian understood: in light of Russia’s long history of foreign invasions, the creation of ‘buffer states’ in the countries of Eastern Europe was a natural objective.
Mr Churchill speaks4 of ‘unlimited expansionist tendencies’ on the part of the Soviet Union. But the following circumstance should not be forgotten. The Germans were able to make their invasion of the USSR through these countries because they had governments hostile to the Soviet Union … So what can there be surprising about the fact that the Soviet Union, anxious for its future safety, is trying to see to it that governments loyal in their attitude to the Soviet Union should exist in these countries? How can anyone, who has not taken leave of his wits, describe these peaceful aspirations of the Soviet Union as expansionist tendencies? … If Mr Churchill and his allies succeed in organising a new armed campaign against Eastern Europe – as they did 26 years ago [during the Western intervention against the Bolshevik regime after the revolution] – it may confidently be said that they will be thrashed, just as they were thrashed the last time.
It was a blunt warning, but Stalin’s swagger masked an inner panic. Despite the Red Army’s size and successes in the war, the Soviet Union did not possess what the US did: the nuclear bomb. The spectacle of what the new American weapon had done to the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 had convinced Stalin that the Red Army’s numerical strength was now meaningless. Soviet society was gripped by the sudden, dreadful knowledge that the warmongers in London and Washington had the means to wipe out Moscow, Leningrad and innumerable other cities. Alexander Werth, the Sunday Times’s correspondent in Moscow, reported that the nuclear terror was all-pervading:
The news [of Hiroshima and Nagasaki]5 had an acutely depressing effect on everybody. It was clearly realised that this was a New Fact in the world’s power politics, that the bomb constitutes a threat to Russia, and some Russian pessimists I talked to that day dismally remarked that Russia’s desperately hard-earned victory over Germany was now ‘as good as wasted’.
Werth was permitted6 to ask Stalin about the bomb, and the dictator had a studiously upbeat reply. ‘Atomic bombs are meant to frighten those with weak nerves,’ he told his questioner, ‘but they cannot on their own decide the outcome of wars. Of course, monopoly ownership of the secret of the atomic bomb creates a threat. But there are at least two remedies. Monopoly ownership of the bomb cannot last for long. And use of the atomic bomb will be prohibited.’
Stalin clearly did not trust prohibition. Moscow had declined to join Washington’s newly created Atomic Energy Commission, which was given the task of regulating nuclear weapons, so only one option remained. The Soviet Union would have to develop its own bomb and quickly. The need became even more pressing when, in March 1947, President Truman announced his doctrine of US support for nations struggling for liberty and democracy, a doctrine aimed initially at preventing Greece and Turkey falling into communist hands, but with the wider target of the East European nations already under the Soviet yoke. It was confirmation that the US and the Soviet Union were on a collision course.
Three months later, Washington announced a programme of economic and technical assistance to European states struggling to rebuild their economies after the war. The European Recovery Program, popularly known as the Marshall Plan, offered to make aid available to countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The total eventually provided7 exceeded $13 billion, or 5 per cent of the United States’ annual GDP, but Washington’s largesse brought obligations with it. Recipient nations would have to furnish details of their national economy and cooperate with US advisers in a programme of modernisation and restructuring. While West European nations eagerly signed up to the Marshall Plan, Stalin was wary. Vladimir Yerofeyev, a member of the Soviet team that negotiated with the Americans, felt Stalin would have liked to take the money but mistrusted Truman’s motives. ‘Stalin was always suspicious8,’ he wrote, ‘and he wasn’t keen on it from the very start. He said: “Just you watch. The situation is quite different from the wartime Lend-Lease American assistance to us. With the Truman Doctrine in place as well, they don’t really want to help us. This is a ploy by Truman. They want to tear the People’s Democracies away from our sphere of influence, to win them over, infiltrate them, and pull them away from the Soviet Union.”’ When Czechoslovakia and Poland said they might take the American money, Stalin ordered them to refuse. He was determined to shape the previously capitalist economies of his ‘buffer states’ to the Soviet model of socialist central planning; American influence was seen as hostile interference.
To counter the Marshall Plan, Moscow created Comecon, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, in January 1949. The new body issued a defiant statement to the Western powers:
The governments of the United States9 of America, of Great Britain, and of certain Western European states have imposed a trade boycott on the countries of People’s Democracy and the USSR because these countries did not consider it appropriate that they should submit themselves to the dictatorship of the Marshall Plan, which would have violated their sovereignty and the interests of their national economies. In the light of these circumstances … the countries of People’s Democracy [Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia] and the USSR, consider it necessary to create the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, on the basis of equal representation between the member countries … to accelerate the restoration and development of their national economies.
The Eastern Bloc was pulling up the drawbridge. But, for Stalin, socialism would be safe only when Moscow had the bomb.
Work had begun on nuclear fission in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, but purges of scientists and the outbreak of war had hampered progress. Soviet spies had alerted Stalin to Western progress on the bomb in the early days of the war, and in 1943 the Soviet Union set up its own research programme. It would be led by the brilliant physicist Igor Kurchatov, known to his colleagues as boroda – ‘the beard’ – because of his long, shaggy whiskers and amiable, shambolic personality. Less than a week after the United States dropped the bomb to end the war in the East, Stalin called Kurchatov and his team to the Kremlin. ‘I have only one demand10 to put to you, comrades,’ he told them. ‘Build us an atomic weapon in the shortest possible time! Hiroshima has shaken the world. The balance of power has been destroyed. You must build the bomb to save us from a grave danger.’ As they were leaving, Stalin called them back. ‘Ask for whatever you want, comrades. You won’t be refused. As the saying goes: if a child doesn’t cry, the mother won’t know what he needs.’
The state of Soviet science was far from rosy. Before the revolution, Russia had produced some of the world’s great scientific minds, from Dmitry Mendeleev, inventor of the periodic table, to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the pioneer of astronautics. But, as in so many areas of Soviet life, science had been undermined by ideological dogmatism. The USSR’s wheat farming had been nearly destroyed when Stalin insisted on implementing the crackpot theories of the agronomist Trofim Lysenko, largely because11 Lysenko was himself a peasant and had caught the dictator’s attention by denouncing the ‘kulaks of science’. Einstein’s theory of relativity, on the other hand, was rejected as ‘bourgeois, reactionary and incompatible with Marxism–Leninism’, probably because its inventor was a German–American Jew. Only when Kurchatov informed the Kremlin that they would be unable to develop an atomic weapon without Einstein’s research did Stalin relent, telling Beria to ‘leave them in peace – we can always shoot them later’.
To speed the research, a new atomic weapons laboratory was created in 1946. Known by the code name Arzamas-16, it was located in the closed town of Sarov, 250 miles east of Moscow. Kurchatov nicknamed his new home ‘Los Arzamas’, a pun on the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos facility in New Mexico, where the bombs dropped on Japan had been created. Support facilities were built across the Soviet Union, and the physicists were well looked after, their salaries doubling or tripling as their work was ever more highly prized. They were shielded12 from the deprivation and food shortages endured by the rest of the population after the war, prompting politburo member Lazar Kaganovich to grumble that the atomic cities were ‘like health resorts’.
But life for the scientists was far from a holiday. An exclusion zone13 was set up around Arzamas-16; the town of Sarov was removed from publicly available maps; and guards patrolled barbed-wire defences around the facility. Even leaving Arzamas was far from easy. Security agents accompanied the leading scientists everywhere they went, and informers were infiltrated into the work teams to keep tabs on employees. The base and its outlying units across the country became known as the ‘White Archipelago’, a more comfortable, privileged version of the Gulag Archipelago, but no less claustrophobic.
The scientists knew they faced harsh reprisals if they failed to deliver what Stalin wanted. A number of Kurchatov’s staff were Jewish, and they were doubly threatened as state-approved anti-Semitism grew after the war. One of Arzamas’s key figures, the scientific director Yuli Khariton, was especially vulnerable. Khariton was not only Jewish, but had spent two years studying at Cambridge University before the war. Both his parents had fled the Soviet Union and he was forbidden to have any contact with them; his father would later be recaptured and sent to his death in the Gulag.
With as many as 10,000 engineers and scientists working at Arzamas, secrecy was of the utmost importance. Andrei Sakharov, who would go on to play a key role in the Soviet Union’s drive for the hydrogen bomb, was warned by a fellow scientist on his first visit to Arzamas. ‘There are secrets14 everywhere, and the less you know that doesn’t concern you, the better off you’ll be. Luckily for us, Khariton has taken on himself the burden of knowing everything.’
The motivations of the Soviet physicists working on the nuclear project were complex. There was the underlying fear of Stalin and the NKVD, of course. But memories of the country’s terrible suffering in the war were still fresh and there was patriotism in their minds too. Sakharov, who would later have doubts about the moral and political implications of his work on the bomb, had none at the time. ‘We believed that our work15 was absolutely necessary,’ he wrote. ‘It was the means of achieving a balance in the world … I had invested so much of myself in that cause and accomplished so much. At that time … the state, the nation and the ideals of Communism remained intact for me.’ Khariton agreed that developing an atomic bomb was ‘necessary to secure the defence of the country’ – it was a continuation of the war, a means of protecting the motherland from the ever-present external threat. Kurchatov had not fought in the war but now, he said, ‘I regard myself16 as a soldier in this new scientific war,’ and often signed his letters ‘Soldier Kurchatov’.
In 1948, when the first Soviet nuclear reactor capable of manufacturing weapons-grade uranium was completed at the newly built Urals town of Chelyabinsk-40, Kurchatov quoted Pushkin’s poem ‘The Bronze Horseman’ in his celebratory speech:
You remember that Peter17 the Great said [of the founding of St Petersburg], ‘Here a town will be established, To spite our arrogant neighbour.’ Well, unfortunately, we still have quite a few arrogant neighbours. So, to spite them we too have founded a town. In your time and mine we will have everything: kindergartens, fine shops, a theatre, and, if you like, a symphony orchestra. And then in 30 years’ time your children, born here, will take into their own hands everything that we have made. And our successes will pale before the scope of theirs. And if in that time not one uranium bomb explodes over the heads of people, you and I can be happy! And our town can become a monument to peace. Isn’t that worth living for?
To build a stockpile of nuclear weapons the Soviet Union needed industrial quantities of uranium and plutonium. It was precisely the sort of project for which the Stalinist command economy was suited; the reserves of slave labour from the prison camps meant tens of thousands of men could be set to work. From 1946 onwards, prisoners dug for uranium in central Asian mines with little or no protection against radiation. Workers were drafted to do the same in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. In 1950, a report18 by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimated that between 150,000 and 200,000 men were ‘working’ on the nuclear project in Soviet-controlled East Germany alone, with a far higher number in the Soviet Union itself. Many of them died slow, agonising deaths caused by exposure to radioactive radon gas. Radiation sickness began to appear in the population living near the Chelyabinsk reactor, as rivers in the region were steadily contaminated. By 1951, over 75 million cubic metres of radioactive waste had been discharged from Chelyabinsk-40. All this remained19 unreported and the sufferers were given no information on the cause of their illness. When labourers died, more were simply brought in.
The Soviet intelligence services also recruited communist sympathisers within the American and British atomic programmes who passed on valuable information throughout the 1940s. Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist working on the Manhattan Project, supplied the Soviets with the design for the Nagasaki bomb. His data had to be verified under rigorous testing, as Moscow feared the West might be passing on deliberate disinformation, but Fuchs’s information undoubtedly helped expedite the construction of the first Soviet weapon.
On 29 August 1949, in a trial given the codename ‘First Lightning’, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb RDS-1fn1 at Semipalatinsk in the deserts of Kazakhstan. Professor Vladimir Komelkov, who had worked on the triggering device, watched the overground explosion from the northern observation post, 6 miles away:
On top of the tower20 an unbearably bright light blazed up. For a moment it dimmed and then with new force began to grow quickly. The white fireball engulfed the tower and, expanding rapidly, changing colour, it rushed upwards. The blast wave at the base swept away structures, stone houses, machines, rolling like a billow from the centre, mixing up stones, logs of wood, pieces of metal and dust into one chaotic mass. The fireball rose, revolved; turned orange, red. Streams of dust, fragments of brick and board were drawn in after it, as into a funnel. Overtaking the firestorm, the shock wave, hitting the upper layers of the atmosphere, passed through several layers of inversion, and there, as in a cloud chamber, the condensation of water began … The sound reached us like the roar of an avalanche.
As the mushroom cloud rose, Lavrenty Beria, head of the Soviet secret police and the political controller of the project, kissed Kurchatov and Khariton on the forehead. For Khariton it was a moment of triumph and salvation. ‘We felt relief21,’ he wrote, ‘even exultation. Now that the USSR had this weapon, we knew that others could no longer use it against us with impunity.’
The Soviet test shocked the Americans. The CIA had told President Truman that Moscow couldn’t build a bomb before mid 1950, and more likely not until 1953. Stalin deliberately made no public announcement of the Semipalatinsk blast and in reply to foreign speculation declared that the Soviet Union had had the bomb since 1947. His aim was to convince the Americans that the USSR already had stockpiles of atomic weapons.fn2
The Soviet nuclear bomb cemented the new bipolar world geometry and brought a tense stalemate to the international scene. The two superpowers had no territorial disputes, but the clash of capitalist and communist dogmas would lead to rivalry and proxy conflicts in the coming years. The threat of nuclear devastation now hung over the world, with only the bleak reassurance of what came to be dubbed Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) – the certainty that neither side could prevail unscathed and that both would therefore be deterred from initiating a war.
The first skirmish came in occupied Germany. The British, French and Americans were finding it increasingly difficult to work with the Soviets and there had been confrontations at the intersection of the occupied zones. The West’s aim was to restore stability and boost the German economy as a bulwark of European post-war recovery. But Stalin preferred to keep Germany weak, partly to punish her and partly to ensure she would never again be in a position to start a war. In early 1948, the Western Allies proposed the creation of an independent Federal German Republic (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) from the French, British and American sectors. The Soviets accused the West of pandering to former Nazis. Their sector would not join the new country, they said, but would instead form a separate state, the German Democratic Republic (DDR), where socialism would provide a guarantee against revanchist fascist tendencies.
On 18 June, the Allies announced that a new currency, the Deutschmark, was being introduced in the Western zones. The Soviets responded that it could not be used in Berlin, where the occupying powers held joint authority. Within a few days, the DDR announced that it was introducing its own currency, the Ostmark, and that this would be the official currency of the whole of Berlin. To underline the point, the Soviet authorities halted all Western shipments into the city, citing unspecified ‘technical difficulties’ with transport links. Allied supplies had to travel by train across the hundred miles of Soviet controlled territory that separated the capital from the West. Now, with train links blocked by Moscow, the Western sectors of Berlin began to run out of food and coal. This ‘island of capitalism in a sea of Communism’ had rankled with Stalin, and his aim was to squeeze the West out of the city. Khrushchev later admitted, ‘We wanted to exert22 pressure on the West to create a unified Berlin inside a DDR that would then close its borders.’ Stalin, he said, was ‘prodding the capitalist world with the tip of the bayonet.’ But he had underestimated the West’s determination.
Truman ordered B29 bombers to fly to US bases in Germany and Britain, hinting (falsely) that they were armed with nuclear weapons. At the same time, the British and US23 air forces began to ferry in supplies to the blockaded city. In the second half of 1948 and the early months of 1949, they completed nearly 300,000 flights, bringing in more than 2.3 million tons of cargo. It was enough to prevent West Berliners from having to seek aid from the Soviets, which would effectively have ceded control over their sectors to Moscow. The Soviet military tried to impede the airlift, buzzing the incoming planes and shining bright lights to dazzle the pilots, but they stopped short of shooting them down. By the spring of 1949, the Berlin airlift had succeeded. Moscow announced the lifting of the blockade on 12 May. The first flashpoint of the post-war years left a legacy of bitterness and mistrust. The Cold War had begun.
By the late 1940s, Stalin was also dealing with a wave of simmering discontent within the ‘countries of People’s Democracy’ that made up his East European buffer states. The Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia was the most unruly of these. Its president, Josip Broz Tito, had been the leader of the Communist partisan movement that fought bravely during the war to liberate the country from the Nazis. Unlike the other East European states, the Yugoslavs had not had to rely on the Red Army for substantial assistance, and although the new government considered itself Communist, Yugoslavia felt it deserved more autonomy than the other members of the Cominform (the Moscow-sponsored organisation of Communist nations).
Tito increasingly refused to bow to orders from Moscow. Contrary to Stalin’s instructions, he tried to seize several Italian towns on the Yugoslav border, and actively supported the Greek Communists in that country’s civil war. Stalin was furious, telling the politburo, ‘I will shake my little finger24 and tomorrow there will be no Tito any more.’ In 1948, Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform, with Moscow accusing it of bourgeois nationalism and of having links to the Trotskyite movement. Tito was reviled in the Soviet media, which habitually referred to the Yugoslav government as ‘Tito and his bloodthirsty clique’.fn3 According to the Soviet25 army general and military historian Dmitry Volkogonov, plans were laid to assassinate him with bubonic plague. But the plot was never implemented.
Tito went on to pursue what he labelled the ‘Yugoslav road to socialism’, a show of independence that was considered an affront to Communist orthodoxy. He informed Moscow of his intentions in a letter of May 1948:
While we study26 and take as an example the Soviet system, we are developing Socialism in our country in somewhat different forms. We do this … because it is forced on us by the conditions of our daily life …’fn4
After its expulsion from the Cominform, Yugoslavia embarked on a savage purge of its own communist party, in which as many as 50,000 Moscow loyalists were tortured and killed. Tito pursued the ‘Yugoslav road to socialism’ by implementing a fierce policy of political non-alignment,fn5 which allowed him to court both communist and capitalist support. (Moscow tried to lure him back into the socialist camp after Stalin’s death, but he continued to benefit from US economic aid and was famously entertained at Buckingham Palace by Queen Elizabeth II in 1972, where he was awarded the Order of the Bath.)
Determined not to allow other states to follow Tito’s example, Stalin ordered purges across the Eastern Bloc to remove potential rebels. In Hungary and Czechoslovakia, there were show trials of the party leadership, reminiscent of the Soviet purges of the 1930s. In Prague28, 14 members of the politburo, including the party’s general secretary, were convicted of ‘Tito-ist’ subversion and treason. The evidence was fabricated but 11 of them were executed and the others sentenced to life in jail.
Elsewhere, communism’s march appeared to be gathering pace. Mao Zedong’s communists had beaten the nationalist Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War (1947–9) and founded the People’s Republic of China in October 1949. But this victory for Marxism was greeted with mixed emotions in the Kremlin. Stalin had not been convinced that Mao’s uprising would be successful and had supported other figures in the Chinese Communist Party. Even when Mao had seized the initiative, Stalin was less than generous in supplying him with aid. When Mao came to Moscow in December 1949, he was not given the welcome of a man bringing the world’s most populous nation into the Communist camp. Khrushchev recalled29 being informed that someone called ‘Matsadoon’ had come to see him. When he asked ‘Who?’ he was told, ‘You know, that Chinaman.’ Mao was made to wait six days for an appointment in the Kremlin. He was well aware he was being insulted, yelling at a Soviet official, ‘I have come here30 to do more than just eat and shit!’
But within a year Stalin was seeking Mao’s help. In 1945, Korea had been divided along the 38th parallel, with Soviet troops occupying the north, and US troops the south. Three years later, the north became the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the south the Republic of Korea. In 1950, when North Korea’s leader Kim Il-Sung asked Moscow’s permission to invade the south, Stalin agreed. The Soviet Union offered to provide arms and equipment for the North Koreans, but made clear that Soviet troops would not play a direct role in the fighting. On 25 June 1950, the Korean War began. Kim’s army won a series of quick victories and Seoul fell within three days, forcing the South Korean troops to retreat into a small zone in the southeastern tip of the peninsula.
But to the Soviets’ surprise, the US came to the south’s aid. Profiting from the absence of the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations,fn6 Washington pushed through a resolution to send UN troops to help the South Koreans. The American army helped the south retake Seoul and crossed the 38th parallel into the north. Stalin realised he had misjudged the situation: he must now decide if he was willing to risk all-out war with America. Kim appealed to Moscow for help, but Stalin refused. According to Khrushchev, when Stalin was asked about the prospect of the US troops reaching the Soviet border he shrugged and replied: ‘What of it31? Let the USA come and be our neighbours in the Far East. They will come there, but we will not fight with them. We are not ready to fight.’
Instead Stalin turned to China. He put pressure on Mao to send Chinese troops, disguised as volunteer units, into the combat zone, and Mao agreed. Fighting continued for over a year until a stalemate was reached at the end of 1951. It took another two years before an armistice was signed. No formal peace treaty was ever agreed. With the border dividing the two Koreas again reverting to the 38th parallel, a tense stand-off began, which lasted into the twenty-first century.
When Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai visited Moscow in 1952, Stalin claimed that the war had been a success because it had shown up the Americans’ weaknesses. ‘The Americans are not32 capable of waging a large-scale war at all,’ Stalin told him, ‘especially after the Korean War … They were just fighting little Korea, and already the American people were weeping about it. What would happen if they started a large-scale war? All their people would be weeping and wailing!’
In fact, the Korean War had been a tactical failure for Stalin. Very few of the estimated 2 million casualties were Soviet, but Moscow had signally failed to get what it wanted in Korea. This had been the first proxy conflict of the Cold War and the Communist aggressors had been repelled. In addition, Stalin’s failure to commit troops to the North Korean cause had strained his relations with Kim Il-Sung and, more importantly, with Mao Zedong.
Despite the setbacks in Berlin and Korea, the USSR’s standing in the world had never been higher. It had proved its military strength in the war, and it had developed a nuclear arsenal. But the Soviet Union’s ‘glorious leader’ seemed to be losing his edge. In 1952, Stalin was 73. His memory and native cunning were beginning to fail him; at times he seemed lost. Khrushchev recalled one incident when Stalin, seemingly unaware of those around him, muttered over and over, ‘I’m finished33. I trust no one, not even myself…’
Doctor Vladimir Vinogradov had been Stalin’s personal physician for several years. He had treated him after the heart attack he suffered in the summer of 1945, and had helped keep his illness secret from the public. But now he faced an even trickier challenge. It was 19 January 1952, and for several months the leader had been showing signs of memory loss, mood swings, irrational behaviour and debilitating fatigue. Vinogradov advised Stalin that he was suffering from hypertension and arteriosclerosis. It was a matter of some urgency that both conditions should be treated, and for the treatment to be effective there would need to be complete rest. In other words, he said, if the leader of the Soviet Union wished to avoid the possibility of imminent death, he would have to retire from public activity.
Stalin reacted with rage. He ordered Vinogradov out of the room. He informed his aides that the doctor should be dismissed from his post and arrested. But Vinogradov was right. The dictator’s lifestyle was finally catching up with him. He rarely exercised and though he drank only occasionally, his nocturnal lifestyle meant he seldom got to bed before the small hours. All this and the stress of leadership had taken their toll. Where once he strode up the mausoleum steps on parade days, now he shuffled, struggling for breath. The more Stalin’s health deteriorated, the more he seemed prey to paranoia. He had taken advantage of Lenin’s long illness in the 1920s to usurp the old leader’s power and now seemed fearful that those around him would do the same to him.
Stalin moved from blaming his own doctor to distrusting all doctors. He had long feared assassination, and now he believed that the doctors trying to preserve his health were bent on killing him and all his comrades. ‘They perish one after another34,’ he told a politburo colleague after several leading Bolsheviks had died from natural causes. ‘Shcherbakov, Zhdanov, Dimitrov – all of them died so quickly! … We must replace the old doctors with new ones!’
In Stalin’s fevered imagination, Vinogradov’s suggestion that he should retire became a treacherous plot to remove him from power. In the following months, he ordered the arrests of other physicians who had treated the party leadership. It was no coincidence that a high proportion of them were Jewish – 1952 was the high-water mark of anti-Semitism in post-war Russia: in August, the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee would be wiped out; in December, the defendants chosen by Moscow to be executed in the Prague trials would also be Jewish.fn7
Stalin’s sick and suspicious mind had fixed on the medical profession and on the Jews. With a sinister neatness, he announced that a wide-ranging conspiracy had been uncovered: the security of the Soviet Union was being undermined by a ‘Jewish Doctors’ Plot’. On 13 January 1953, Pravda ran a front-page article under the headline ‘Vicious Spies and Killers behind the Mask of Academic Physicians’:
This terrorist group36 of saboteur-doctors were conspiring to shorten the lives of the Soviet leadership by means of medical sabotage. Exploiting their position as doctors, they deliberately and viciously undermined their patients’ health by making incorrect diagnoses, and then killed them with bad and incorrect treatments … All the participants of the terrorist group of doctors were in the service of foreign intelligence, having sold their bodies and souls. Most of them were recruited by the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organisation, an arm of American intelligence. The filthy face of this Zionist spy organisation and its vicious actions are now completely unmasked … Comrade Stalin has repeatedly warned us … We must liquidate sabotage and purge complacency from our ranks.
Hundreds of people were arrested, most of them Jews. Leading Jewish writers and intellectuals were told they must sign an open letter, already drafted for them by the Kremlin, calling for stern measures against the ‘plotters’. Many agreed to do so but some, including the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, had the courage to refuse. As usual, the secret police used torture to extract confessions from their prisoners. Stalin called the judge37 in the case and told him to ‘beat them, beat them and beat them again’, and he warned the security minister that if the doctors did not all confess, he would himself be ‘shortened by a head’. When the arrested men were coerced into signing false admissions of guilt, Stalin told the politburo, ‘See! You are like blind38 kittens! What would have happened without me? The country would perish because you don’t know how to root out our enemies!’
The next purge was being planned. A show trial was being prepared for the doctors, but its aim was to draw in many more victims, up to and including top party leaders. At the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952, Stalin had attacked Mikoyan and Molotov for their ‘shoddy work’, seemingly paving the way for their replacement by younger, less threatening figures. Beria too had reason to fear the dictator was planning to remove him from his post. Stalin seemed to be preparing a repeat of the so-called Leningrad Affair of two years earlier, in which party leaders whom Stalin perceived as rivals were accused of corruption and embezzlement. Six of them had been executed and over 2,000 removed from their posts.
But Vinogradov, his fellow doctors and the hundreds of others under arrest would never come to trial. On 5 March 1953, Stalin died.
On 17 February, Stalin had left the Kremlin to spend time at his dacha in the Kuntsevo district on the western outskirts of Moscow. For the next ten days, all state business was conducted by telephone to the Kremlin and by documents transported back and forth by official car. Nowadays the large green-walled dacha stands uninhabited amid Moscow’s birch forests, its two perimeter fences and security guards dissuading any curious visitors. In Stalin’s time it was even more securely protected, with camouflaged anti-aircraft guns and machine-gun nests manned around the clock by NKVD special troops. On Saturday 28 February, Stalin told his guards he would not be going out, but then changed his mind. He ordered his chauffeur to drive him into town, where he spent the evening with his politburo colleagues Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev and Bulganin, watching an American western in his private cinema in the Kremlin.
The five of them arrived back at the dacha at around 11 p.m. According to the security men, ‘the boss’ was in good spirits and the kitchen staff were told to prepare dinner. Often, Stalin would ply his guests with booze, waiting for any drunken remark he could use against them as proof of their disloyalty. If he was in a spiteful mood, he would mock his colleagues for their gluttony and alcoholism. Sometimes he would force the corpulent Khrushchev to dance the traditional Ukrainian gopak. On this occasion, the boss ordered two bottles of wine and rang a little later for some more. He saw off his visitors at 3 a.m. and retired to his room an hour later, having told the security men to ‘go and get some sleep39. I’m also going to bed, I won’t be needing you today.’
Stalin usually rang the bell for attention when he woke. But on the morning of Sunday 1 March, there was silence. The staff were in a quandary: the boss’s instructions were not to come into his room until he rang, but as the hours went by they began to worry. At 6 p.m. a light came on in his room, much to everyone’s relief. But Stalin still did not emerge or call them in. Eventually at ten in the evening Pavel Lozgachev, the deputy commissioner of the dacha, was selected to take a package into Stalin’s room. He found him slumped on the floor, barely conscious, in a pool of his own urine. The leader of the Soviet Union had been lying helpless for hours; a stroke had left him hovering between life and death, but no one had dared disobey his orders to come and check on him.
According to Lozgachev, Stalin was conscious but unable to speak. They lifted him onto the chaise longue from which he had fallen and called the Kremlin. The news caused panic. The first minister who received the call refused to take it. Eventually, Beria came on the line and asked for details, but it was over two hours before he and Malenkov finally arrived at the dacha.fn8 By then, Stalin was lying unconscious with his eyes closed, and the two men approached him cautiously on tiptoe. Lozgachev recalled Beria telling Malenkov to ‘wake him up!’ When Malenkov refused to do so, Beria turned around to those present and said, ‘What are you looking at40? Can’t you see that Comrade Stalin is sleeping? You’re all panicking for nothing. If anything happens, then you can ring me and we’ll come with the doctors.’
It was already 2 a.m. and the dictator was slipping away. The dacha staff were so cowed by his authoritarian rages that they froze, incapable of making a decision. No doctor was called until mid morning on Monday 2 March, by which time it was too late.fn9 After lying unconscious for another three days, Stalin suffered a brain haemorrhage and on the morning of 5 March he vomited blood. Those present took turns to pay their final respects. According to Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, Beria kissed the dying man’s hand and sobbed pitifully, but immediately afterwards seemed full of glee. Svetlana’s account of her father’s final moments is horrifying:
For the last 12 hours41 the lack of oxygen became acute. His face and lips blackened as he suffered slow strangulation. The death agony was terrible. He literally choked to death as we watched. At what seemed like the very last moment, he opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry, and full of fear of death. He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something up above and bringing down a curse on all. The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace.
At 9.50 p.m., Josif Vissarionovich Djugashvili, the son of a Georgian cobbler who had ruled over the largest empire in the world for nearly 30 years, died at the age of 74. The following day, 6 March, newspapers were printed with black borders and Soviet radio replaced its transmissions with funereal music. A morose Yuri Levitan, the USSR’s most famous newscaster, announced Stalin’s death:
Dear Comrades42 and Friends. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union … announces with profound sorrow that Josif Vissarionovich Stalin, chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers and secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, has died after a grave illness. The heart of Lenin’s comrade-in-arms and the inspired continuer of Lenin’s cause, the wise leader and teacher43 of the Communist Party and the Soviet people, has stopped beating … The immortal name of Stalin will live for ever in the hearts of the Soviet people and all progressive mankind. Long live the great, all-conquering teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin!
Four days of mourning were announced, during which public figures outdid each other in the extravagance of their praise for the dead dictator. The names by which his immense vanity had been flattered over the years were repeated again and again: ‘Leader and Teacher of the Workers of the World’, ‘Father of the Peoples’, ‘Friend and Teacher of All Toilers’, ‘Wise and Intelligent Chief of the Soviet Nation’, ‘Greatest Genius of All Times and Peoples’, ‘Shining Sun of Humanity’, ‘The Lenin of Today’ and ‘Mountain Eagle and Best Friend of All Children’.
On 9 March, a bitterly cold, grey day, nine pallbearers carried Stalin’s coffin from the House of Soviets, the scene of his show trials, to the newly renamed Lenin–Stalin Mausoleum on Red Square. Malenkov led the procession with Zhou Enlai, the Chinese foreign minister at his side. Beria and Khrushchev followed behind, and eulogies were read by Molotov, Beria and Malenkov. Then Joseph Stalin was laid to rest beside his ‘comrade-inarms’, the man who in his testament had warned in vain of the danger Stalin represented (see here).
For the Soviet population, brought up on decades of propaganda glorifying their Great Leader, Stalin’s death was a cause of genuine grief. A huge crowd braved the elements to attend the ceremonies, covering Red Square with a carpet of flowers.fn10 Many spoke of feeling ‘orphaned’ by Stalin’s death and fearing the Soviet Union without his guiding hand would now be overwhelmed in a world of menacing capitalist forces. The novelist Alexander Zinoviev would later comment on the mass hysteria that underpinned the people’s sorrow:
The Soviet people45, conditioned by decades of lies and pretence, effortlessly, freely and gladly made themselves feel sincere grief … just as they would later, and with all the ease of well-trained creatures of Communism, put themselves into a state of sincere rage at the thought of the evil actions of their former idol and his vile henchmen, actions about which they had seemingly known nothing, although it was they who had helped Stalin’s henchmen carry them out.
In an incident redolent of the Khodynka disaster, which cast a shadow over Nicholas II’s reign (see here), Stalin’s funeral was attended by its own tragedy. With hundreds of thousands of people converging on Red Square, the police tried to control them by erecting barriers of trucks across the capital’s main arteries. But as crowds built up at these bottlenecks, people became trapped. More than 500 of them were crushed to death. News of the catastrophe was suppressed and, like Khodynka, it became a taboo subject. The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko said it was the moment he realised something was very wrong in his country:
The breath of tens46 of thousands of people jammed against one another rose up in a white cloud … New streams poured into the human torrent from behind, increasing the pressure … We were caught between the walls of houses on one side and a row of army trucks on the other. ‘Get the trucks out of the way!’ people howled. ‘Get them away!’ ‘I can’t. I’ve not been given any orders,’ a very young, bewildered police officer called back, almost crying with desperation. People were being crushed against the trucks by the crowd; their heads were being smashed; the sides of the trucks were running with blood. And all at once I felt a savage hatred for everything that had given birth to that ‘I have no orders’, when people were dying of someone’s stupidity. For the first time in my life I thought with hatred of the man we were burying. He could not be innocent of the disaster. It was that ‘I have no orders’ that had caused the chaos and the bloodshed.
The target of Yevtushenko’s anger was Soviet autocracy, the way in which society was indoctrinated not to think for itself, and the sinister ease with which chaos and bloodshed were consequently inflicted upon it. Estimates of the balance sheet of death for Stalin’s reign vary tremendously. Alexander Solzhenitsyn claimed that as many as 60 million had perished as a result of Stalin’s brutality – from warfare, famine, torture and execution; Robert Conquest, the ground-breaking chronicler of the Terror, puts the figure at 20 million; and the British historian Norman Davies, writing with the benefit of recent research, offers an estimate of 50 million.
At the time of Stalin’s death, the USSR was suffering from a desperate shortage of young men, principally because of the war, but also because so many had disappeared into the Gulag. Heavy industry was returning to pre-war levels, but the economy as a whole was in dire straits. Soviet agriculture was struggling to feed an ever-increasing urban population; there had been little improvement in consumer goods and services, and transport remained chaotic. Housing was still desperately inadequate, and the labour force lived under grim conditions with no incentive to improve the quality of their work. Stalin’s successors would be faced with deep-rooted material problems, as well as a population that had been physically decimated and psychologically traumatised. And looming over everything was the question of how to address the legacy of the man who had run the country so brutally for so long.
fn1 The significance of the initials was never officially confirmed, but many took them to mean Rossiya delayet sama (Russia has done this alone).
fn2 By doing so, he also sowed suspicion that the USSR might have made progress towards the next goal in the escalating arms race, the development of the hydrogen bomb. The quest for the new weapon would run until 1961, when the Soviet Union tested a 100 megaton bomb, five times more powerful than anything the US had ever tested and a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. The ‘Tsar bomb’, as it was known, had the capability to wipe out an area the size of Greater London.
fn3 This led to an amusing example of how eagerly, but sometimes clumsily, the Soviet public tried to support the official line on political matters. In 1956, during a brief rapprochement between the two countries, crowds turned out to welcome the Yugoslav leader on a visit to Moscow with banners enthusiastically proclaiming ‘Long live Tito and his bloodthirsty clique!’
fn4 By splitting from Moscow and living to tell the tale, Tito pulled off the trick that Hungary and Czechoslovakia would signally fail to do in the following two decades. Indeed, the memory of Yugoslavia’s defiance almost certainly contributed to the Kremlin’s determination to crush later revolts when they arose elsewhere.
fn5 As early as 194527, Tito had warned the two superpowers: ‘We demand that everyone be allowed to be master in his own house … we do not want great powers to involve us in some policy of spheres of interest …’
fn6 Moscow had been boycotting the UN since the start of the year in protest at Taiwan’s presence on the Security Council.
fn7 Klement Gottwald, the President of Czechoslovakia, declared: ‘During the investigation35 and trial of the anti-state conspiratorial centre, we discovered a new channel by which treachery and espionage penetrate into the Communist Party. It is Zionism.’
fn8 The journey in those days would have taken around 15 minutes, and their delay has been the subject of subsequent speculation. Were Beria and his colleagues too scared to go, or were they secretly hoping to give Stalin enough time to die before they got there?
fn9 There is irony in the fact that many of the country’s leading doctors were locked up in the cells of the Lubyanka as a result of Stalin’s own actions.
fn10 Sergei Prokofiev, who had died on the same day as Stalin, would have no flowers for his funeral; all had been requisitioned for the official ceremonies. Only a kindly neighbour44, who brought her potted plants to Prokofiev’s graveside, ensured he was not entirely forgotten.