Stalin had permitted no talk of succession. In the confusion after his death, Lavrenty Beria, Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgy Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev hastily assumed the collective leadership of the country. One of their first acts was to halt the proceedings in the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ and try to moderate the rhetoric of anti-Semitism. They set about putting Stalin’s papers ‘into necessary order’, a sensitive and potentially dangerous task for men who had themselves been involved in the excesses of Stalinism. All of them had something to hide, and all were concerned to protect their own interests. Stories abound that Beria stole the document safe from Stalin’s dacha in order to destroy the compromising material the dictator had accumulated about him (and to squirrel away the compromising data about his colleagues). While the ‘collective leadership’ was ostensibly happy to share the responsibilities of power, in reality each was desperate to be the sole man in charge.
Malenkov, a loyal follower of Stalin, described by Yevtushenko as ‘a man with a womanish face and a studied diction’, emerged as the most powerful candidate. He was promptly named chairman of the Council of Ministers, effectively prime minister. In September, Khrushchev took over Malenkov’s former role as secretary of the party, and a period of duumvirate power began. Beria, though, remained ominously in the background as head of the security services, with an intimate knowledge of where the skeletons – literal and figurative – were buried. The unspoken fear was that another dictator might gather as much power as Stalin, and Beria was seen as the most likely potential tyrant. Svetlana’s description of his delight at Stalin’s death was later confirmed by Khrushchev, prompting speculation that Beria had poisoned him.fn1 An autopsy was carried out, but the results were ‘lost’ and no official cause of death was ever established.
Immediately after Stalin’s death, Beria had declared an amnesty for all convicts serving sentences of less than five years, excluding political prisoners. By the summer of 1953, the streets were full of petty criminals freed from the camps, and rumours were circulating that Beria intended to use them to help him take power. Khrushchev didn’t wait. He warned Malenkov1 that ‘Beria is getting his knives ready for us,’ and proposed that they form an alliance to avert the threat. Malenkov, who had worked closely with Beria in the last years of the purges and had much to hide, agreed. Khrushchev enlisted the help of Marshal Zhukov and several members of the Central Committee Presidium (as the politburo was now known). At its next meeting, on 26 June, Khrushchev took the floor to accuse Beria of being a British spy. He moved to have him dismissed from the Central Committee and the motion was swiftly passed. Taken aback, Beria could only mumble, ‘What’s going on2 Nikita Sergeyevich? Why are you picking fleas from my trousers?’ before Zhukov and a group of armed officers burst into the room to arrest him. At his trial in December 1953, Beria was convicted of treason, terrorism and counter-revolutionary activity. On hearing the sentence, he collapsed to his knees and begged vainly for his life. He was taken at once to be executed by firing squad. His body was incinerated and the ashes scattered outside Moscow. There was a hint of relief in Khrushchev’s quip that ‘Beria was killed3 at the Presidium meeting that he had expected to sweep him to power.’ The security services were brought under the control of the party and renamed the KGB (Committee of State Security). Beria’s former allies were removed from their posts.fn2
As head of the secret police, Beria had been responsible for sending countless numbers of people to the labour camps and for the running of the Gulag. In camps across the country, inmates greeted the news of his death by throwing their shapki (fur hats) into the air in celebration. Since the end of the war, groups of imprisoned soldiers and partisans had been causing trouble in the Gulag, and Beria’s downfall unleashed a spate of uprisings. The biggest of them was at the Kengir camp in Kazakhstan where, in the summer of 1954, some 13,000 prisoners went on strike. According to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, the political uncertainty following the death of Stalin left the prison authorities unsure how to respond. ‘They had no idea4 what was required of them,’ Solzhenitsyn wrote, ‘and mistakes could be dangerous. If they showed excessive zeal and shot down a crowd they might end up being punished as henchmen of Beria. But if they weren’t zealous enough, and didn’t energetically push the strikers out to work – exactly the same thing could happen!’
As the authorities vacillated, the rebels seized control of the camp. They set up their own provisional government led by former army officers, demanding shorter working days, better conditions and a review of all sentences. They were not simply rioting criminals; they wanted justice from the regime and an element of humanity in the way the state treated its people. After forty-two days5 of hesitation, Red Army troops with T-34 tanks were sent to crush the revolt, killing 700 rebels. But the sacrifice of the Kengir prisoners and others across the country was not entirely in vain. The uprisings made it clear to the Soviet leadership that there was a serious problem in the judicial system. An investigative commission was set up under the Central Committee secretary, Pyotr Pospelov. Its report, delivered in early 1956, laid bare the abuses of summary justice in the USSR since the 1930s, a period in which none of the current leaders of the party had been entirely innocent.
The Pospelov Report put the leadership in a quandary. If they suppressed it, they would be covering up the crimes of Stalinism and possibly leaving the way open for a new dictator in the future. But if they published it, they would open themselves to accusations of complicity in the abuses. The Twentieth Party Congress, the first since Stalin’s death, was scheduled for February 1956, less than a month away. A decision had to be made quickly. Khrushchev made it.
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was an unlikely Machiavelli. He had begun life6 as a shepherd, before becoming a miner in the Don Basin. During the First World War, he was active in the labour movement and fought for the Reds in the revolution, joining the Bolsheviks in 1918. Khrushchev rose through the local party network and in 1938 was appointed first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party. By 1949, he had become Central Committee secretary in Moscow.
Sir William Hayter, the British ambassador to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, found Khrushchev full of native wit, energy and ambition. He was no intellectual, Hayter told me three decades later, and his character was rough and unrefined, but Khrushchev had a dogged persistence that served him well. His conversation was peppered with folksy sayings and his Ukrainian background sometimes made his remarks hard to follow, but even this he used to his advantage, wrong-footing his opponents with colourful – often scabrous – comments. In his memoirs7, Hayter wrote that Khrushchev was ‘like a little bull who, if aimed in the right direction, would charge along and be certain to arrive with a crash at his objective, knocking down anything that was in his way’. He had initially underestimated Khrushchev, misled by his rough, peasant-like manners. At a dinner in 1954, Khrushchev seemed to struggle to follow the conversation and needed Malenkov to explain things to him in ‘words of one syllable’. Along with the other British embassy staff, Hayter felt that Malenkov, a man of aristocratic background, well-spoken and with impressive academic qualifications, was the most likely of the collective leaders to win the power struggle. They were soon to realise how wrong they were.
Even before the Party Congress in February 1956, Khrushchev had outmanoeuvred his rivals. Like Stalin before him, he had used his position as first secretary to put his supporters into positions of power. Malenkov had been forced to stand down as chairman of the Council of Ministers, and Khrushchev’s ally Bulganin took over the post. Sensing danger, Malenkov had aligned himself with his fellow old-guard Stalinists, Molotov and Kaganovich, opposing Khrushchev’s drive for power.
Khrushchev needed to respond, and the Pospelov Report was a useful weapon. His opponents were all implicated in the purges of the 1930s; they were the ones with the most to lose if the report came out, and Khrushchev began to argue in favour of publishing it. ‘If we don’t tell8 the truth at the Congress,’ he told them, ‘we’ll be forced to do so at some time in the future. And then we won’t be the people making the speeches – we’ll be the people under investigation.’ But Malenkov and the others objected, and by the time proceedings opened on 14 February, the leadership had not reached a consensus.
On the very final day of the Congress, 25 February, Khrushchev announced that an unscheduled, closed session would be held without foreign delegates or observers. Khrushchev approached the microphone in the Great Kremlin Palace and hesitated for a moment before beginning. The text in his hand, which history would come to know as ‘The Speech on the Personality Cult and its Consequences’ – or simply ‘The Secret Speech’ – was based on a draft that Pospelov had supplied. But Khrushchev had expanded and widened the scope of its revelations. For the first time, Lenin’s Testament condemning Stalin, and Lenin’s letter threatening to sever all relations with him, were read aloud. There was a stir in the hall, but Khrushchev pressed on. Stalinism, he said, had been a damaging perversion of the ideals of Communism; the cult of personality, in which one man was so powerful that his decisions alone were enough to distort true Communist values, had violated the norms of collective leadership and brought the party into disrepute.
Comrades, it is foreign9 to the spirit of Marxism–Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics, akin to those of a god. Such a man supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behaviour. Such a belief about a man, and specifically about Stalin, was cultivated among us for many years. The cult of Stalin became the source of a whole series of exceedingly serious perversions of party principles, of party democracy, of revolutionary legality …
The result, Khrushchev said, was unchecked lawlessness and injustice, including repressions and murder on a mass scale. Now there was a murmur in the hall: the speech was becoming inflammatory.
Comrades! Stalin was10 a very distrustful man, full of sickly suspicions. He would look at a man and say: ‘Why are your eyes so shifty today?’ or ‘Why are you not looking me directly in the eyes?’ Everywhere he saw ‘enemies’, ‘two-faced deceivers’ and ‘spies’ … There was the cruellest repression against anyone who in any way disagreed with Stalin. ‘Confessions’ were acquired through physical pressures. Innocent individuals – who in the past had defended the party line – became victims. Mass arrests and deportations of many thousands of people, execution without trial and without normal investigation created conditions of insecurity, fear and even desperation.
Stalin had had a hand in the murder of Sergei Kirov, Khrushchev claimed; the Doctors’ Plot and the Leningrad Affair were both fabrications. The murderous purges of the 1930s and the terrible reprisals against delegates to the Congress of Victors in 1934 were all carried out at Stalin’s behest; even his handling of the war had been a bungling disaster. ‘He was a coward11,’ said Khrushchev. ‘He panicked. Not once did he go to the front during the whole war.’
For four hours the delegates listened in something approaching a state of shock. The end of the speech was followed by ‘a deathly hush’; then people stood up and began to disperse, unsure of what to say to one another. Some of those present were excited that the shadow of the dictator was being lifted, at least in part; others feared exposure for their collusion in the abuses. There were reports of heart attacks among the delegates and suicides in the days and weeks that followed. The speech was not published in the Soviet press, but it was read out to party members at special meetings. The foreign communists12, who had not been allowed to hear the presentation, soon learned about it and leaked much of its contents abroad. Polish delegates sent the text to the New York Times and the Observer.
Khrushchev had undoubtedly been courageous in confronting the legacy of Stalinism, but the speech was a compromise. Its focus was on the repression of Communist Party personnel, rather than the sufferings of the ordinary people; it dealt only with events that occurred after 1934, and it pinned all the blame on Stalin. Khrushchev suggested that he and some of the other party leaders did not know enough about Stalin’s doings at the time to be able to intervene and stop him. He did, though, make a point of criticising Beria, and he hinted that Malenkov was closely connected to Stalin’s misdeeds.
The speech was a huge gamble for Khrushchev. It risked turning the party against him and it opened him to criticism for his own actions in the past. There were stormy discussions across the country and some fierce demonstrations against the speech’s ‘slurs’ on Stalin’s good name. A young Mikhail Gorbachev was shocked by the reaction to the speech in his native Stavropol, where many people still regarded Stalin as the protector of the people, not their oppressor. In Georgia, protesters took to the streets in defence of the dead leader’s honour. Thousands chanted ‘Glory to Great Stalin!’ and ‘Down with Khrushchev!’ The protests escalated into riots, in which dozens were killed or injured. Years of propaganda13 and misinformation had left the population confused and incapable of differentiating truth from lies.
Despite the protests, Khrushchev’s actions won him substantial support. Junior and mid-level party-state officials, many of whom were too young to bear any direct responsibility for the crimes of the Stalin era, rejoiced that terror and the ‘cult of personality’ were to be banished in favour of ‘collective leadership’ and ‘socialist legality’.fn3 They wanted guarantees that the abuses of the past would never return and that democratisation would be the way of the future. The bedrock support he gained in 1956 would aid Khrushchev in his future struggles for power, while weakening the position of his future opponents, the old-guard Stalinists Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich.
The ‘secret speech’ had immediate and unwelcome consequences in Central and Eastern Europe. There had already been disturbances in Czechoslovakia and Hungary after Stalin’s death, as people sensed an opportunity to win greater freedom from Soviet domination. In East Germany15, 500 striking workers were killed when they demanded the resignation of the pro-Stalinist government. Now Khrushchev’s speech breathed new life into reformist and opposition groups across Eastern Europe. In Poland, intellectuals demanded change, and workers went on strike; 38 people were killed in clashes between protestors and police in Poznan. Khrushchev threatened to send tanks into Warsaw if the authorities failed to restore order. Tensions were eased when Wladyslaw Gomulka became party leader in October 1956, replacing the former Stalinist government and introducing a more liberal brand of ‘national’ Communism. Peasants were allowed to leave collective farms, and the Catholic Church was no longer barred from teaching religion in schools. Perhaps mindful of Stalin’s acerbic conclusion16 that ‘imposing Communism on Poland is like trying to put a saddle on a cow’, Moscow backed off.
The crisis in Hungary would be far deeper. Since the end of the war, the country had suffered under the dictatorship of ‘Stalin’s Best Hungarian Disciple’, Matyas Rakosi. But the concessions won by the Poles raised hopes that Hungary too might be allowed a degree of autonomy. In parallel with the changes in Poland, Rakosi was removed from power in the summer of 1956. It was not enough. Limited reform sparked demands for more. On 23 October17, 20,000 students took to the streets of Budapest, demanding free speech, open elections with genuine opposition parties and the withdrawal of Soviet occupation forces. By evening the crowds had swollen to nearly 200,000. They toppled a 30-foot bronze statue of Stalin, paraded Hungarian flags with the Communist emblem cut out from the centre and attacked the headquarters of the Hungarian secret police. The police fired on the crowd, and street fighting broke out between the demonstrators and Soviet and Hungarian troops. The prime minister, Imre Nagy, had a revolution on his hands. A reformist himself, Nagy had some sympathy with the protestors’ demands and, after a fraught discussion with his cabinet, he announced that the government supported the people’s cause. Nagy remained in contact with Moscow, and by 28 October he seemed to have brokered a deal. A ceasefire was announced and Soviet troops were withdrawn from Budapest.
In the Kremlin, the Presidium were divided. In an effort to preserve Communist unity against the West, Khrushchev had made overtures to Tito to repair Soviet relations with Yugoslavia. He had agreed a compromise in Poland. But now Hungary threatened to undermine all the progress that had been made. After some hesitation, the Presidium decided to act. Members of the Warsaw Pact were told that military action would be taken against the ‘counter-revolutionary forces’ threatening Hungary. (In an exchange with Tito, Khrushchev asked plaintively: ‘What option do we have?18 If we let things take their course, the West would say we are either stupid or weak, and that’s one and the same thing. We cannot possibly permit it, either as Communists or internationalists, or as the Soviet state. We would have capitalists on the frontier of the Soviet Union.’)
The Warsaw Pact had been created by the Soviet Union in 1955 as a military response to NATO and a means of binding Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union. Its founding charter had promised ‘respect for the independence and sovereignty of member states’ and ‘non-interference in their internal affairs’. Hungary was soon to discover just how empty the rhetoric was.
On 4 November19, Red Army troops with 3,000 tanks led by Marshal Konev, one of the heroes of the Battle for Berlin, embarked on Operation Whirlwind, with orders to retake Budapest. (The resolution adopted by the Soviet Central Committee justified this by saying it would be ‘unforgivable’ for the Soviet Union ‘not to help the working class of Hungary in its struggle against the counter-revolution’.) The invasion took the Hungarians by surprise. Imre Nagy had been negotiating with Yuri Andropov, Moscow’s ambassador to Hungary, oblivious to the fact that the tanks were already on their way. He immediately declared Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and called on the UN for assistance. The West, however, was embroiled in the crisis over Suez and, with British and French forces invading Egypt, the United States could hardly condemn the Soviets. Left to face the Red Army alone, the Hungarians fought bravely. Pockets of resistance20 held out for a week. But on 10 November, with thousands dead and much of central Budapest in ruins, the revolution was stifled. Nagy was arrested, held by the Soviet authorities for 18 months and hanged in June 1958.fn4 The general secretary of the Hungarian party, Janos Kadar, who had cooperated with the Soviet invaders, was installed as the head of the government. Moscow had made an example of Hungary and preserved its ‘buffer states’ intact. But its actions had disgusted many Western communists and damaged Khrushchev’s standing at home and abroad.
Khrushchev’s secret speech had created uncertainty in the Soviet Union and unrest in Eastern Europe. Its denunciation of Stalinism alienated traditionalist Communist states such as Albania and, more importantly, China. Beijing’s version of Communism was hardline and doctrinaire, in tune with Stalinist ideology. The more Khrushchev spoke of peaceful coexistence with the West, the more Mao Zedong feared a weakening of Communist orthodoxy and a lack of resolve to support him in his opposition to the United States. Within a couple of years, Beijing would be formally denouncing the ‘treacherous revisionist21 clique of the Soviet leadership’.
Khrushchev’s position as the dominant force in Moscow’s collective leadership was beginning to look precarious. Apparently unaware of the gathering storm clouds, he acted with the ebullient self-confidence, verging on arrogance, that had served him well in earlier years. Despite his attack on the ‘cult of the individual’, he made sure his picture appeared every day in the press. He demanded adulation from radio, television and cinema. He insisted on making a show of his authority and was delighted when his grandson asked him: ‘Grandad, are you22 the tsar?’ But his bullying, condescending style alienated potential supporters, and his fondness for alcohol and crude anecdotes led to fears that he would embarrass the Soviet Union on the international stage.
Molotov, in particular, had long wanted rid of Khrushchev. As a close ally of Stalin, he resented and feared the revelations made in the ongoing process of liberalisation. In June 1957, together with Malenkov and Kaganovich, Molotov persuaded a majority of the Presidium to demand Khrushchev’s resignation. At a meeting of the Council of Ministers they confronted him and demanded that he step down. But Khrushchev refused. Stalling for time, he argued that he had been elected by the whole of the Central Committee and he would not go without their agreement. He had won a breathing space, but he needed to garner enough support to survive the impending vote23. He turned once more to Marshal Zhukov, now minister of defence, and asked him to mobilise the air force to fly in as many sympathetic Central Committee members as possible from across the country. Their support was enough to save Khrushchev and secure his position as General Secretary of the Party. Turning on his opponents, he accused them of complicity in Stalin’s crimes, dubbing them the ‘Anti-Party Group’. Zhukov was drafted in to denounce Molotov and Malenkov as the main accomplices of Stalin’s purges. Together with Lazar Kaganovich, they were removed from the Central Committee, a fate that in previous times would have been accompanied by arrest and possible execution. (When Kaganovich called Khrushchev to plead for mercy, Khrushchev gleefully replied: ‘Your words yet24 again confirm what methods you intended to use for your vile ends … You measure other people by your own standards. But you underestimate me.’) Khrushchev announced that Molotov would be sent as Soviet ambassador to Mongolia, while Malenkov was to run a power station in Siberia, and Kaganovich was made head of the cement industry in Sverdlovsk. All three had been banished to obscure posts, their political careers effectively ended, but in refusing to jail them, Khrushchev was signalling that Stalinist methods were no longer admissible. Bulganin, who had played a part in the conspiracy, was forced to resign as chairman of the Council of Ministers and Khrushchev now became both first secretary and prime minister. His position as supreme ruler was safe, but his erratic, unpredictable nature would be writ large in the erratic, unpredictable course of his country in the years ahead.
fn1 In his memoirs, Molotov claims Beria himself boasted that he poisoned Stalin, telling the politburo that Stalin had been planning to remove them, and that he – Beria – had ‘saved us all’.
fn2 Beria was certainly not a British spy, but his fate should not inspire pity. In 1998 there was a grim reminder of what kind of man he had been. At his trial, Beria had been accused of a number of rapes and sexual assaults, but such accusations had been common practice during Stalin’s reign as a means of disgracing the accused, and not everyone believed them. When Beria’s house on Moscow’s Garden Ring later became the Tunisian embassy, however, work was carried out on water pipes in the garden and the bones of five young girls were uncovered. Declassified archives have confirmed what many suspected: there are statements from Beria’s bodyguards that he would drive them around Moscow pointing out girls they were to abduct for him to rape. Those who resisted too vigorously or threatened to expose Beria’s deeds ended up buried in his wife’s rose garden.
fn3 Forty years later, Mikhail Gorbachev organised a conference to commemorate the Twentieth Party Congress. He praised Khrushchev’s14 ‘political courage’ and marvelled at the ‘huge political risk’ he had taken. Gorbachev said Khrushchev had shown himself to be ‘a moral man’ by beginning the process of unmasking Stalin’s crimes. A modern Soviet reformer was acknowledging his debt to a kindred predecessor.
fn4 In 1989, on the thirty-first anniversary of Nagy’s execution, I attended a ceremonial reburial of his remains in Budapest’s Municipal Cemetery. Unexpectedly, hundreds of thousands of Hungarians turned out to witness the righting of one of the wrongs of Communism’s past. The impact of the ceremony helped accelerate the overthrow of Communism in Hungary.