12

Post-War Stalinism and the Break with Yugoslavia

The years between the end of the Second World War and the death of Josif Stalin in March 1953 saw dramatic change in the Communist world and in its relations with Western democracies. First of all, the number of Communist states increased from the pre-war two to twelve. Second, the first great split occurred within the international Communist movement which hitherto had been remarkable for its cohesion. Just one year after the creation in 1947 of the Cominform (the successor organization to the Comintern, which had been abolished in 1943), Yugoslavia was expelled from that body. Third, the co-operation which had existed between the democracies and the Communists during World War Two gave way to the division of Europe, Cold War, and high tension.

For the Soviet leadership, and most of the population, the dramatic rise in the number of Communist-ruled countries could be judged a cause for celebration. The average citizen was not aware of the extent to which a majority of these regimes had been far from voluntarily embraced by the workers in those countries. Within Russia and most of the other Soviet republics (the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania being the most obvious exceptions) there was in the immediate aftermath of the war a sense also of relief and optimism – relief that a horrific conflict had come to an end and optimism about rebuilding their shattered motherland and a better life. Not only were the buildings in countless cities and villages in ruins, but there was scarcely a family that had not been bereaved in the war. For many, the premature loss of a close relative had occurred earlier – in the famine of the early 1930s or the purges later in that decade, but the wartime losses were far greater. In 1945 nevertheless, Stalin was more popular than ever throughout most of the Soviet Union – especially in Russia – although there were aspirations for something better than the Soviet Union’s pre-war existence.

It would be wrong to think that a majority of Soviet citizens in the early post-war years rejected the system they had grown up in, however horrendous some of its manifestations had been. A famous study of former Soviet citizens, known as the Harvard Project, found, through systematic interviews conducted in 1950, that the younger generation, in particular, accepted many aspects of the system, although not, for example, the collective farms. Those interviewed were people living outside the Soviet Union who, if unrepresentative of the population as a whole, were likely to be untypical in their greater hostility to the system. These were former Soviet citizens who had either used the opportunity in war to leave the USSR or had been displaced by the war and chose not to return. Those among them, a member of whose own family had been arrested by the secret police, were, unsurprisingly, the most hostile to the Soviet system. There was, however, strong support among the early post-Second World war émigrés for state ownership and control of industry and for a welfare state. Support for institutionalized civil liberties and political pluralism was fairly weak even within this émigré group. The kind of freedom they wanted was quite basic: mainly the freedom to talk openly among their friends, to be able to move about freely, and not to have to live in fear of arbitrary action by the state authorities.¹

Naturally Soviet citizens aspired also to greater material comfort. There were soldiers who had fought in the war and thus become aware of the higher standard of living of people in other countries, even when those lands had been devastated by the conflict. The Russian writer Viktor Astafiev observed the influence of the West on soldiers returning to the Soviet Union who had seen with their own eyes that the defeated enemy was living better than they did and that life ‘under capitalism was healthier and richer’. Astafiev suggested that Stalin’s campaign against ‘cosmopolitanism’ (discussed later in the chapter) was partly in order to destroy any admiration for the West that this might have instilled. The temptation for those who had fought beyond the Soviet borders to compare favourably what they had witnessed there with their own lot, when they returned to their native village and ‘looked at the cockroaches and at their hungry children’, had to be stamped out.² Catherine Merridale, who made a study of letters written by Red Army soldiers during the Second World War, found that in the summer of 1945 officers’ letters ‘asked for more freedom, more education, and a livelier cultural life’. None of them, however, ‘demanded democracy, let alone Stalin’s scalp’.³ In the course of the war, Stalin–‘because he lived mainly in men’s imaginations’ – had seemed to the overwhelming majority of those who fought in the Soviet army to embody ‘progress, unity, heroism, deliverance’.⁴

It was Stalin, people believed, who had led them to a great victory. The fact that no alternative standpoint – such as information about Stalin’s culpability for the earlier losses – could be aired in the mass media, or published even in the smallest-circulation book, naturally reinforced rosy views of Stalin and of the invincibility of the Soviet system. The connection between faith in the vozhd’ and trust in the system was not accidental. Stalin himself believed that the extravagant build-up of his ‘image’ (though that was not then a term in use – it was four decades later that it entered Russian political discourse) as a charismatic, almost superhuman, leader helped to solidify support for Communism and to bestow on it legitimacy.⁵ After Nikita Khrushchev had denounced the cult of personality of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 (a momentous event to be discussed in the next chapter), he received a letter from an old Bolshevik, P. Chagin, which is now in the Russian state archives. Chagin mentioned that he had been a member of the party since July 1917, and recalled a supper in Leningrad in 1926 to which he had been invited by Sergey Kirov (who in that year became head of the Leningrad party organization). The principal guest at the meal was Stalin. In the course of the conversation, Kirov said that without Lenin it was difficult, but ‘we still have the party, the Central Committee, and the Politburo, and they will lead the country along the Leninist path’. Stalin responded:

    Yes, it’s all true – the party, the Central Committee, the Politburo. But keep in mind, our people understand little of all that. For centuries the people in Russia were under the tsar. The Russian people are tsarist. For many centuries the Russian people, and especially the Russian peasants, have been used to being led by just one person. And now there must be one [italics added].⁶

This was a persistent belief of Stalin. It was self-serving, since it was his power and prestige which was being augmented, but there is no reason to doubt that this remark also reflected his deep conviction. These were not sentiments Stalin could express in public, for they were too far removed from Marxist-Leninist ideology, but he uttered them on other occasions in private. In a conversation with a fellow Georgian in the mid-1930s, Stalin said that ‘the people need a tsar, i.e., someone to revere and in whose name to live and labour’.⁷ It was the embodiment of those beliefs in the Stalin cult that led a distinguished student of Soviet history and politics, Robert C. Tucker, to argue that in the last fifteen years of Stalin’s life the Soviet Union had moved from being a regime of a Bolshevik type to one of a Führerist type.⁸

Communism, as was to become clear after the Second World War, took significantly different forms in different places at different times. However, the defining features of a Communist system, outlined in Chapter 6, remained in place in the Stalinist post-war years. Compared with the 1920s, the Soviet Union had become more autocratic than oligarchic, but the monopoly of power of the Communist Party and iron discipline within it remained keystones of the system. Throughout the Soviet period, the political police were on tap rather than on top. They were an instrument of control at the disposal of the top party leadership, though sometimes that meant just the top leader and at other times it meant the party leadership collectively. When it meant the top party leader alone – as was the case of the Soviet Union during Stalin’s last two decades – this significantly modified the notion of party control over the political police. Although they were under the jurisdiction of the Communist Party leader, who could hire, fire, or kill the head of the security police, these forces could, nevertheless, be used against party members, including very senior ones. They were ultimately accountable to only one person, and that was Stalin, who remained the party chief.

The repressive organs of the Soviet state had a complex lineage. In the post-war Stalin years Beria (who headed the NKVD directly from 1938 until 1945) had partial supervisory responsibilities over the security forces in his capacity as a deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, while within the party Secretariat Alexey Kuznetsov was their overseer. Neither man had comparable control over them to that of Stalin. Moreover, Kuznetsov was himself arrested and shot in 1949. A year earlier Stalin had reprimanded him and the head of the MGB, Viktor Abakumov, for having taken an important decision ‘without the knowledge or consent of the Politburo’.⁹ Stalin took care to ensure that the actual ministers in direct charge of the repressive organs, such as Abakumov, did not have close personal relations with either of their supervisors within the Council of Ministers or the Central Committee, whether Beria, Malenkov or Kuznetsov.¹⁰ While Stalin could not devote equal attention to all spheres of policy, two areas over which he was exceptionally protective were the security organs and foreign policy. Abakumov, who headed the MGB from 1946 until 1951, had earlier been in charge of ‘Smersh’ (an acronym from the Russian words for ‘Death to the Spies!’), the wartime counterintelligence organization. Abakumov was, however, arrested in 1951, while Stalin was still alive, and executed in 1954, a year after the leader’s death. Immediately following Stalin’s demise, Beria’s power increased. The MGB was amalgamated with the MVD, and Beria became the head of this new organization, wielding potentially vast punitive powers. (At the same time he was promoted from the rank of deputy chairman to that of first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers.)¹¹ After Beria had departed from the scene, the two police organizations were separated again – in 1954. The part with political police functions became the KGB. The ‘K’ stood for Committee – Komitet–a symbolic downgrading from Ministry.

Stalin from 1941 until his death was head of the official governmental machine as well as of the Communist Party. Until 1946 that post was known as the Chairmanship of Sovnarkom (the Council of People’s Commissars). It was then renamed the Council of Ministers. ‘Commissars’ had revolutionary connotations, and Stalin explained the change by saying that there was no need for a term which reflected revolutionary rupture, since the war had shown that ‘our social order is now secure’.¹² Ministries were important political institutions in the late Stalin years and senior ministers were well represented on the Politburo. Yet the Communist Party allowed not the slightest challenge to its own hegemony. No other party was allowed to exist and no other organization was allowed any autonomy, although there was a significant differentiation of functions, with the ministries having a real job of work to do. But the system was highly ideologized, and the various campaigns – which for the targets of criticism could, ultimately, have fatal consequences – were orchestrated by the Department of Propaganda and Agitation (known as Agitprop) of the party’s Central Committee.¹³ Throughout the Soviet Union, moreover, the supremacy of the Communist Party was reflected in the fact that in every territorial unit of the country the top official was the party first secretary of that area, whether it was a republic, such as Ukraine, where for most of the 1940s the first secretary was Nikita Khrushchev (he was briefly replaced by another senior Politburo member, Lazar Kaganovich); an industrial region, such as Dnepropetrovsk, where, from 1947 to 1950, Leonid Brezhnev was the party boss; or an urban or rural district. At the most local level of all, that of the collective farm, a façade of democracy allowed peasants to ‘vote’ on who the farm chairman would be, but they were presented with just one name, that of the person chosen by the district party organization.

Stalin and His Circle

At the top of the hierarchy stood Stalin, still fully in charge. This does not mean, of course, that he took every decision himself – a physical impossibility – but that he could intervene in any area and impose his views. Moreover, other members of the leadership team lived in fear of him. The fear and the ingrained habit of obedience were such that Stalin’s supreme authority remained equally unquestioned when he departed, as he grew older, for increasingly long holidays in the south of the country. Later Soviet leaders, Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev, had coups mounted against them while they were on vacation. When their hands were thus removed from the levers of power, there was an opportunity for disgruntled senior colleagues to strike. Stalin, who kept in close touch with the group of senior Politburo members left in temporary charge in Moscow, was in no such danger. He did not in the post-war years engage in bloodletting on the same scale as in the late 1930s, but what had happened in those years was firmly implanted in the minds of all around the Soviet leader. A number of them had put their signatures on the death sentences of old Bolsheviks and so had become Stalin’s partners in crime.

Sergo Mikoyan, the son of one such leader, the longstanding Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan, has written of those like his father moving as if in ‘a cage’, constrained not only by Stalin but by their unquestioning belief in ‘the interests of the Party’, the crucial importance of party discipline, the interests of ‘socialism’, and the need to maintain ‘Soviet power’. Mounting a partial (in both senses) defence of his father, and distinguishing him from NKVD ‘butchers’, Sergo Mikoyan also compares the behaviour of Stalin’s circle with those who surrounded his successors, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. ‘The latter’, he says, ‘served the dictators, who were not murderers. The former had to deal with a first-class murderer. Extenuating circumstances for the latter are evident – they did not serve a murderer. But “extenuating” circumstances can also be found for those who constantly felt the coldness of a gun barrel at the back of their heads.’¹⁴ (Mikoyan is somewhat misleading in his reference to Khrushchev and Brezhnev in two respects – first, calling them ‘dictators’. Under both, especially the latter, power at the top was more oligarchical than autocratic, even though the party leader wielded significantly greater power than anyone else. Second, neither of them, especially Khrushchev, was guiltless of the blood of fellow citizens.) Stalin had ‘only’ one member of the Politburo executed in the years between the end of the war and his own death, the victim being Nikolay Voznesensky, an economist and the chairman of the State Planning Committee (Gosplan). He was arrested in 1949 and put to death, aged forty-six, in 1950. Those who had been Stalin’s allies for many years were somewhat safer from arrest than newer members of the higher party echelons, but they too were given stark reminders of their relative powerlessness vis-à-vis the top leader.¹⁵ Thus, for example, Polina Zhemchuzhina, the wife of Vyacheslav Molotov, who had long been the right-hand man of Stalin in the Politburo, was arrested and imprisoned in early 1949, and released only after Stalin’s death. A long-serving Politburo member, Mikhail Kalinin, who was of less political consequence than Molotov – even though he was the formal head of state, as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet – fared still less well in family terms. His wife was imprisoned in 1938, and Kalinin’s pleas for her release were granted only in 1945, when he was already terminally ill. He died in 1946.

Stalin could be irrational, seeing conspiracies and dangers where they did not exist. His purges before the war also went much further than was necessary simply to secure his unrivalled power. Even from that cold-blooded perspective, they were, in the most literal sense, examples of overkill. In the post-war period, however, Stalin did not engage in repression on the scale of that between 1936 and 1938.¹⁶ For much of the time he employed the ‘rational political calculation’ of the ‘mafia boss’.¹⁷ As T.H. Rigby put it:

    Stalin wanted to be obeyed, he wanted to be secure against conspiracy, and he believed that instilling fear was essential to winning and maintaining that obedience and security. Having achieved this by egregious display of his power to kill, he thenceforth avoided the obvious mistake of so abusing his power as to drive his entourage to collective desperation. The prudent despot or gangster boss will seek to ensure that those around him, those on whom he depends for information and for executing his will, are men whose unqualified subservience and sensitivity to his needs has been tested over many years, and whose strengths and weaknesses he knows inside out.¹⁸

Stalin’s favour could be bestowed upon or removed from a Politburo member at will. He operated through a smaller group than the Politburo as a whole and the insiders varied over time. Even Molotov and Mikoyan, surviving old Bolsheviks and his longstanding allies, were severely reprimanded by Stalin in late 1945 and 1946. The nature of the relationship was such that, though Molotov brought himself to abstain in a Politburo vote in late December 1948 to expel his wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, from the Communist Party, a few weeks later he wrote to Stalin to say that he realized he had been politically mistaken in not voting for her expulsion. In the meantime Stalin had circulated copies of the correspondence between them in late 1945, bringing to the attention of other members of the ruling group Molotov’s earlier mistakes. One of those errors in 1945 had been to allow excerpts from a speech by Winston Churchill to be published in Pravda. Even though Churchill had been quoted warmly praising not only the Russian contribution to winning the war but also Stalin personally, the publication had been condemned at the time by Stalin as displaying dangerous servility to foreign politicians who were thereby masking their ‘hostile intentions toward the USSR’.¹⁹ ‘Such praise’ from that source, said Stalin, writing from his holiday home on the Black Sea, ‘only grates on me’.²⁰

The day after Molotov’s retraction of his failure to vote against Zhemchuzhina – in January 1949–she was arrested.²¹ Although they remained personally devoted to one another, less than a month earlier they had divorced on Stalin’s instructions. Zhemchuzhina was of Jewish origin, and when Stalin’s policies took a strongly anti-semitic turn from 1948, she came under suspicious scrutiny. Whereas many people were arrested who had not broken the rigid rules of the Soviet game, still less committed any crime, Zhemchuzhina had done enough to incur Stalin’s wrath. She greeted the first head of the Israeli diplomatic mission to Moscow, the future prime minister of Israel, Golda Meir, very warmly at a reception on the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution–7 November 1948. She spoke with her in Yiddish, and when Meir expressed surprise that she spoke it well, Zhemchuzhina replied: ‘I am a daughter of the Jewish people.’²² Her enthusiasm for the new state of Israel was visible, and was duly reported to Stalin.²³ Yet her loyalty to the Communist Party was transcendent. Moreover, the extent to which Stalin had become the personification of the party is indicated by Zhemchuzhina’s response when Molotov told her Stalin’s words, ‘You need to divorce your wife!’ Molotov recalled her saying: ‘If that is what the party demands, then that is what we shall do.’²⁴ Equally revealing is the tone of Mikoyan’s response after he had been severely rebuked by Stalin: ‘I shall devote all my energy so that I may learn from you how to work correctly. I shall do all I can to draw the lessons from your stern criticism, so that it is turned to good use in my further work under your fatherly guidance.’²⁵

A more recent recruit to the leadership team who had risen fast, Georgy Malenkov, who had been in day-to-day control of the party organization in the immediate post-war period, was replaced in that role in 1946 by Andrey Zhdanov, a secretary of the Central Committee and former head of the Leningrad party organization, who was in Leningrad throughout the wartime siege. Zhdanov became the agent of a crackdown on intellectual and cultural life in the early post-war years, but although this period between 1946 and his death at the age of fifty-two in 1948 became known as the Zhdanovshchina (the time of Zhdanov, with the shchina having a pejorative connotation in Russian), the policy was essentially Stalin’s.²⁶

No branch of intellectual life was exempt from the official philistinism. Russia’s most distinguished living composers, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, were severely criticized for their ‘formalism’. Among the writers who were scurrilously attacked were one of Russia’s greatest poets of the twentieth century, Anna Akhmatova, and the popular prose writer, especially renowned for his humorous short stories, Mikhail Zoshchenko. Neither of them was imprisoned, but both were expelled from the Writers’ Union and denied the right to publish. In this period, more than ever, there was a sustained attack on any literature which might be deemed to be ‘un-Soviet’, Western or bourgeois. Although Zhdanov was the principal spokesman for the policy which combined ‘party-mindedness’ with an increasingly nationalist conservatism, its initiator was Stalin. Intense pressure was placed on the most outstanding representatives of ‘high culture’, although an important exception to that generalization is that the Russian classics continued to be published. Long-dead great writers fared better than living ones. Some, such as Dostoevsky, because of their religiosity, were published only rarely, but it was still possible for readers in the Soviet Union to get their hands on the works of, for example, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Lermontov and other outstanding representatives of nineteenth-century Russian literature. These works provided access to different values and a different way of looking at the world from that purveyed by Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist orthodoxy. That had long-term political significance, especially since this was a time when cultural influence from the outside world was being rigorously excluded.

In addition to such high culture, the post-war Stalin years saw the creation of a middle-brow literature which catered for the tastes of the ‘new class’ or ‘middle class’ of Soviet officials and technocrats. Its appeal was to the broad readership represented by upwardly mobile Soviet citizens. In the words of Vera Dunham, who made an innovative study of this social stratum, which she dubbed the middle class, and its reading matter:

    Stalin’s political leadership had nurtured certain allies in the past. It had relied in those earlier days on the workers. It had appealed, too, to the intelligentsia. But this time [in the post-war period] it looked for a new force, sturdy and pliable. And it was the middle class which offered itself as the best possible partner in the rebuilding of the country. The middle class had the great advantage of being ‘our own people’: totally stalinist, born out of Stalin’s push for the industrialization, re-education, and bureaucratization of the country, flesh of the flesh of Stalin’s revolutions from above in the thirties, and ready to fill the vacuum created by Stalin’s Great Purge and by the liquidation of the leninist generation of activists.²⁷

This was part of a more conservative turn in Soviet politics, with the party leadership – perhaps only semi-consciously – looking for a new social base. Labour laws remained harsh and the peasantry continued to be treated badly. During the war, peasant plots, tended usually by women and children, had been expanded spontaneously. A decree of September 1946 put a stop to that, insisting that this family-cultivated land be returned to the collective or state farms. However small they were, the private plots throughout the Soviet period produced a disproportionately large share of the vegetables and fruit available for purchase by nearby townspeople, while helping, in most years, to keep the peasants themselves alive. Manual workers, too, in spite of the lip-service paid to them, continued to be subject to draconian labour laws. In the post-war Stalin years, moreover, there was much less emphasis than in the twenties and thirties on giving preference for places in higher education to children of worker or peasant background. When a nineteen-year-old student from a southern Russian village, and peasant family, called Mikhail Gorbachev was offered a place in 1950 at Moscow State University – one of the Soviet Union’s most prestigious educational institutions – this was very much the exception rather than the rule. A larger proportion than in pre-war days of the entrants to leading universities now came from the new ‘middle class’ or from intelligentsia backgrounds.

Yugoslavia: From Stalinism to ‘Titoism’

While the leadership of the USSR was preserving strict discipline and control at home, it was expanding Soviet power and influence abroad. The Communist takeovers in Eastern Europe have been discussed in Chapters 9 and 10. The notion, accepted at the time within the international Communist movement, of ‘different roads to socialism’ was often misunderstood by gullible sympathizers to imply tolerance of a variety of systems. In the world beyond Marxist-Leninist straitjackets, there could, indeed, be a variety of ‘socialisms’ and significant differences even from one Communist system to another, but that was not recognized by the Soviet leadership and not at all what in orthodox Communist doctrine was meant by ‘different roads’. This was an endorsement of different ways of reaching the same destination. The paths might vary, but the road being traversed was to the one and only ‘socialism’, the type which prevailed within the Soviet Union.

Yugoslavia was especially quick to adopt many of the essential features of the Soviet system, since the wartime victory of the partisans had brought them to power without having to make such significant concessions to non-Communist parties as occurred elsewhere, albeit temporarily, in Eastern Europe. The Yugoslavs adopted the Soviet system of five-year plans and took a decision to move ahead with rapid industrialization as early as 1946. By the end of that year, over 80 per cent of Yugoslav industry and a number of banks had been nationalized. The leadership moved more cautiously in agriculture, with only a little over 6 per cent of the country’s arable land in state or collective farms by 1948.²⁸ The break with the Soviet Union, which occurred in that year, was not a result of the Yugoslavs being in any sense soft-liners. Not only had they moved faster than most other East European leaderships in establishing a Communist system at home, they were also eager to help the Greek Communists come to power, although Stalin had already accepted, in his wartime talks with his Western allies, that Greece was outside the Soviet zone of control.

There had been a number of areas of irritation in Soviet – Yugoslav relations even before the break between the two countries occurred in 1948. When Tito learned after the war that, during it, Stalin had been discussing with Churchill how much influence the Soviet Union and Britain would have in post-war Yugoslavia, he was far from pleased. And although Stalin had earlier been attracted to the idea of a federation aimed at uniting Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania, he did not take kindly to Tito’s immediate post-war travels in the region and Yugoslav initiatives in seeking a Balkan federal state. Another area of friction was over the creation of Soviet – Yugoslav joint-stock companies. The Yugoslav negotiator, Vladimir Velebit, broke off negotiations with the Soviet Union because he regarded the conditions the Soviet side wished to impose as exploitative. The Yugoslav Communists, although deeply conditioned to admire the Soviet Union and Stalin, were not going to be pushed around. As Dennison Rusinow put it:

    The basic issue in the great quarrel of 1948 was very simple: whether Tito and his Politburo or Stalin would be the dictator of Yugoslavia. What stood in Stalin’s way was Tito’s and hence the Yugoslav regime’s autonomous strength, based on the uniqueness in Eastern Europe of Yugoslavia’s do-it-yourself and armed Communist revolution and its legacy: a large Party and People’s Army recruited primarily on the basis of patriotic rather than socialist slogans, and the independent source of legitimacy as well as power which came from the Partisan myth of political founding.²⁹

In 1947 the Yugoslavs had enthusiastically supported the formation of the Cominform. It was all the more pleasing that, on Stalin’s suggestion, the headquarters of the body was to be in Belgrade. The Cominform embraced not only the East European Communist parties but also the two largest parties in Western Europe, those of France and Italy. Stalin’s assumption was that through the Cominform, as in the past via the Comintern, other parties could be kept in line, and if need be, their leaderships would be replaced. Stalin was highly displeased by what he regarded as lack of consultation in advance concerning the foreign policy moves of Yugoslavia, in particular, and Bulgaria, although both the Bulgarians and the Yugoslavs rejected the idea that they had failed to keep the Soviet authorities informed. The leaderships of these parties were summoned to Moscow for a meeting with Stalin which took place on 10 February 1948. As the number one Bulgarian Communist, Dimitrov came in person. Tito, more cautiously, stayed at home and sent other senior colleagues, including Edvard Kardelj, to join Milovan Djilas, who had gone on ahead to Moscow. One of Stalin’s concrete complaints was the fact that Yugoslavia had sent two army divisions into Albania, the Yugoslavs arguing that they were necessary in order to protect Albania from possible attack by Greek ‘monarcho-fascists’. Dimitrov was criticized for having spoken about the creation of an East European federation, in which Greece would be included.³⁰

When Stalin told the Yugoslavs that the Soviet Union had not been consulted about the entry of their army into Albania, Kardelj responded that this action had been taken with the consent of the Albanian government. Stalin shouted: ‘This could lead to serious international complications. Albania is an independent state. What do you think? Justification or no justification, the fact remains that you did not consult us about sending two divisions into Albania.’³¹ Kardelj said he could not think of a single foreign policy issue on which the Yugoslav government had not kept in touch with the Soviet leadership, to which Stalin replied: ‘You don’t consult us at all. That is not your mistake, but your policy – yes, your policy!’ On the issue of support for the Greek Communists in their insurgency, Stalin was especially adamant. He asked Kardelj if he believed in the success of the Greek uprising, to which Kardelj replied that he did if foreign intervention did not grow and if serious political and military errors were not made. Stalin’s response was scathing:

    If, if! No, they have no prospect of success at all. What, do you think that Great Britain and the United States – the United States, the most powerful state in the world – will permit you to break their line of communication in the Mediterranean? Nonsense. And we have no navy. The uprising in Greece must be stopped, and as quickly as possible.³²

Stalin was a cautious international actor. He had two reasons above all for upbraiding the Bulgarians and (especially) the Yugoslavs. One was his fear that they would inflame the international situation and antagonize the Western powers unduly at a time when the Soviet Union was still in the early stages of recovery from the devastation of the Second World War.³³ The other was his perennial concern to be in control of the entire international Communist movement and have every major policy of another party cleared in advance by the Soviet Union. That applied particularly to foreign policy and especially to parties that had taken over the reins of state power. At the February 1948 meeting Stalin spoke aggressively to Dimitrov, saying: ‘You wanted to astound the world, as though you were still Secretary of the Comintern. You and the Yugoslavs do not let anyone know what you are doing, but we have to find out everything on the street. You face us with a fait accompli!’³⁴ Dimitrov humbly admitted to errors and added that through errors they were learning how to conduct foreign policy, to which Stalin’s response was: ‘Learning! You have been in politics fifty years – and now you are correcting errors. Your trouble is not errors, but that you are taking a line different from ours.’ Milovan Djilas, who was a participant-observer in this meeting and who recorded these exchanges in literary form some years after he had written an official account of them, adds that he felt sorry for Dimitrov: ‘The lion of the Leipzig Trials, who had defied Goering and fascism from the dock at the time of their greatest power, now looked dejected and dispirited.’³⁵

While Dimitrov accommodated himself to Stalin’s wishes, relations between the Yugoslav and Soviet leaderships deteriorated rapidly. In the course of March 1948, the Soviet side suspended negotiations on a renewal of the Soviet – Yugoslav trade agreement, and then withdrew Soviet military advisers and civilian specialists from Yugoslavia. An increasingly acrimonious correspondence between Tito and Stalin commenced with a letter from Tito sent on 20 March. Some of the accusations from the Soviet side were, in fact, true – that the Yugoslavs had not nationalized the land or collectivized agriculture, though they had pursued a ‘left extremist’ policy in other areas. They had also obstructed the recruitment of Soviet agents in Yugoslavia. But their most basic sin had been to refuse to take orders from the Soviet Union. The response was put delicately, but clearly, in one of the Yugoslav replies to Stalin: ‘No matter how much each of us loves the land of socialism, the USSR, he can in no case love his own country less.’³⁶

The exchange of letters between the Yugoslav and Soviet leaderships included an invitation to the CPSU to send a delegation to see how badly informed they were about developments in Yugoslavia. The Soviet rejoinder was to summon the Yugoslavs to attend a Cominform meeting, which on this occasion would be held in the Romanian capital, Bucharest. Each side declined the invitation of the other. Tito was particularly alert to the dangers of attending, and said to Djilas: ‘If we have to be killed, we’ll be killed on our own soil!’³⁷ There is some evidence that Stalin did attempt to have Tito assassinated. In 1948 the Yugoslav party leaders were accused by Moscow of having adopted an ‘anti-Soviet stand…borrowed from the arsenal of counterrevolutionary Trotskyism’.³⁸ It is plausible to suppose that Stalin would wish to subject Tito to the same fate as Trotsky, especially in the period when Tito was isolated both from the Communist bloc and the rest of the world – before, that is, Yugoslavia began to improve its external relations with both the developing and developed world. And, indeed, a former aide to Khrushchev claimed that among the very few papers found in Stalin’s desk after his death was a note from Tito written in 1950 which read: ‘Stalin. Stop sending assassins to murder me. We have already caught five, one with a bomb, another with a rifle…If this doesn’t stop, I will send one man to Moscow and there will be no need to send another.’³⁹ There is also a document found in the archives of the Soviet security organs (called the MGB at that time), which discusses various ways in which Tito could be assassinated. The proposal was addressed to Stalin personally, and though it does not carry his signature of authorization, it is likely that he approved it, for preliminary preparations had begun. The assassination project was terminated after Stalin’s death.⁴⁰

At the Bucharest meeting on 28 June 1948, Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform. The Yugoslav party leadership was accused of ‘leftist’, ‘adventurist’ and ‘demagogic and impracticable’ measures. ‘Healthy elements’ within the party, ‘loyal to Marxism-Leninism’, were urged either to force their leaders to mend their ways or to replace them.⁴¹ Stalin had little doubt that he would prevail in a trial of strength with Tito, one way or another. Khrushchev recalls Stalin, characteristically, saying: ‘“I will shake my little finger – and there will be no more Tito. He will fall.”…But this did not happen to Tito. No matter how much or how little Stalin shook, not only his little finger but everything else that he could shake, Tito did not fall.’⁴² There were, indeed, people within the ranks of the Yugoslav party who believed that Stalin and the Cominform could not be wrong, and therefore the fault lay with their own top political leadership. Tito’s former army chief of staff was killed by Yugoslav border guards while trying to reach Romania. The assumption about his intentions was that he would either prepare an invasion of Yugoslavia or head a pro-Soviet government in exile.⁴³ Some senior Yugoslav ‘Cominformists’ were jailed. Their number eventually reached around 14,000.⁴⁴ Even after the Soviet – Yugoslav rupture came out into the open in June, there was widespread hope within the Yugoslav party that the breach with the Soviet Union could be healed. How little the desire to break with the USSR came from the Yugoslav side is illustrated by the words of Tito, in July 1948, as he closed the Fifth Congress of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia: ‘Long live the Great Soviet Union with the genius Stalin at its head!’⁴⁵

At that time the Yugoslav Communists did not have an ideological position which was in any way distinctive from that of the rest of the international Communist movement. Indeed, their first reaction to Soviet criticism was, voluntarily, to try to speed up their assimilation to the established model of a Communist system. In particular, they greatly accelerated the collectivization of agriculture. The number of collectivized farms increased almost tenfold between 1947 and 1950–from 779 to 6,797. There was peasant resistance to this, and the possibilities of higher productivity in larger farms were not realized because of lack of appropriate farm machinery. Overall agricultural production fell to 73 per cent of pre-war levels. The situation was greatly exacerbated by severe drought in 1950 which led a Soviet diplomat to observe to a Western counterpart that ‘God is on the side of the Cominform.’⁴⁶ Nevertheless, the growing tension with the Soviet Union and the rest of the Communist bloc brought about a patriotic surge of support within Yugoslavia for the new regime. Tito and the Communists had been losing popularity between 1945 and 1948 with a substantial part of the 94 per cent of the population who did not belong to the party. Now a majority of the people rallied behind them. In the words of Rusinow, the Yugoslav leadership could look for support to only two sources: ‘on the one hand, a disciplined and loyal Party apparatus in unchallenged, monopolistic, and fear-inspiring control of the country; on the other hand, a populace ready to acknowledge the legitimacy of the regime and defend its existence with more effort and better results than sullen fear alone could ever invoke’.⁴⁷

Before long, however, they were to get an additional source of support, perhaps unexpectedly given the fact that Yugoslavia was still, in most key respects, a Communist system. This came in the form of economic aid from the United States. Following the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform, the Truman administration took a decision to offer economic assistance which would help keep an independent Yugoslavia afloat. US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in a communication with the American embassy in Belgrade in early 1949, said that it was in the ‘obvious interest’ of the United States that ‘Titoism’ should continue to exist as an ‘erosive and disintegrating force’ in the Soviet sphere.⁴⁸ In November 1950, President Truman sent a letter to Congress in support of a Yugoslav Emergency Relief Act, making no mention of Yugoslavia’s Communist political and economic structure, but using a strategic argument: ‘The continued independence of Yugoslavia is of great importance to the security of the United States. We can help preserve the independence of a nation which is defying the savage threats of the Soviet imperialists, and keeping Soviet power out of Europe’s most strategic areas. This is clearly in our national interest.’⁴⁹ In other words, the White House’s strategic calculation clearly outweighed American ideological hostility to Yugoslavia’s Communist system.

Having initially tried to prove to the Soviet leadership and the Cominform that they could be as Stalinist as Stalin, the leadership of the Yugoslav party, in the face of the vituperation directed at them from the rest of the international Communist movement, started to question the credentials of that very Soviet model they had earlier uncritically admired. Since, however, they had copied it as faithfully as they could, they had to look with fresh eyes at what they had themselves constructed if they were to differentiate themselves both organizationally and ideologically from Soviet orthodoxy. The main direction of the reforms undertaken in Yugoslavia was towards decentralization. A new law in 1949 gave more power to local government. The most striking innovation, although it was more impressive in theory than practice, was the introduction of what was called self-management.

In principle, social ownership by the workers of their own factories was to replace bureaucratic state ownership and control. Tito introduced a new law to this effect in 1950, and much was made of it, although the state continued to possess most of the functions accorded to it by the Soviet-style command economy, and the factory manager remained an agent of state control. The move in the direction of ‘workers’ control’ of the factories was, in part, an ideological counteroffensive against the Cominform, but it was also the beginning of a process by which work councils did gradually acquire greater powers. After their creation in June 1950, ‘workers’ self-management’ took its place alongside the Partisan war as one of the two basic sources of legitimation of the regime.⁵⁰ Collectivization of agriculture was abandoned in the first half of the 1950s, although restrictions on the size of household farms meant that they still did not maximize economic efficiency. More generally, there was a gradual development of a distinctive ‘Yugoslav model’.

Symbolizing the change, the name of the Communist Party was altered in November 1952 to the League of Communists. In the course of the 1950s the Communists gradually adjusted themselves to a less rigid application of the party line (for the League was still, in essence, the party), not deciding in advance in the party group how to vote on every item of the agenda in the public bodies to which they belonged.⁵¹ The party also gradually accepted a reduced role in economic management. The Soviet planning system, with its compulsory targets, gave way to indicative planning and a gradual move to market prices, so that by the mid-1960s ‘market socialism’ became another distinctive feature of the Yugoslav model.⁵² From its foundation, the Yugoslav Communist state had federal forms; however, both state and party institutions were initially highly centralized. But yet another distinguishing mark was to be the development of a real federation. By the later 1960s, much power had passed from the centre to the republics. Thus, a federalism of substance, rather than simply of form, became an additional feature of the Yugoslav model that distinguished it from what was to be found within the Soviet Union.

The Purges under Late Stalinism

Yugoslavia had become the first Communist state to attempt to reconstruct and revise the Soviet model, and so it is hardly surprising that, even in its earliest manifestations, these deviations were vehemently condemned by the Cominform. Before long, Stalin had instigated a search for ‘Titoist agents’ in the upper echelons of other Communist parties and the Eastern European governments.⁵³ So long as the Yugoslav system existed, and increasingly diverged from the Soviet model, it was seen by Stalin as a dangerous deviation to be eliminated. The greatest worry was that the idea of different models of ‘socialism’ might catch on. The American hopes expressed by Dean Acheson that Yugoslavia would turn out to be an ‘erosive and disintegrating force’ precisely encapsulated Soviet fears. The expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform had been a manifestation, in part, of a hardening Soviet line. A Russian historian has argued that rather than being interpreted primarily as a split in the international Communist movement, it should be seen as a means by which the Soviet leadership was able to unify it by cracking down much harder on any independent tendencies in East European Communist parties, thus enabling Moscow more fully to achieve its strategic goals throughout the region.⁵⁴ Fighting Titoism and ‘national deviations’ now became a major theme of Soviet foreign policy. It was the justification employed for a wave of arrests and trials throughout Eastern Europe. Later the arrests acquired an anti-semitic hue and were connected with the too enthusiastic welcome, as it seemed to Stalin, which had been given by Soviet Jews to the creation of the state of Israel (even though the Soviet Union had supported its establishment). The arrests were followed by show trials in which false confessions were obtained from prisoners – often through beatings, in some cases by more subtle means. They were reminiscent of what had occurred in the Soviet Union in the 1930s – and not coincidentally. Soviet advisers from the MGB arrived in the East European countries to provide expert organizational advice.

Those arrested included very senior members of the party leadership in every European Communist state. In Albania, the Minister of the Interior, Koçi Xoxe, who really had been well disposed towards Tito, was arrested, and executed in 1949. A leading member of the Politburo of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Traicho Kostov, who was certainly no ‘Titoist’, was arrested in March 1949 and put on trial in December of that year. To the consternation of the authorities, he repudiated his confession in court. The public broadcast of the trial came to a sudden halt and ‘the simultaneous translations provided for foreign journalists developed immediate technical difficulties’.⁵⁵ Kostov was executed promptly thereafter. Not every leading Communist who was a victim of this purge had been chosen specifically in Moscow, but many of them had been identified there. In the case of Kostov, for example, the Soviet archives show that Stalin himself linked him with Tito and urged the Bulgarians (with the help of their Soviet advisers) to investigate him.⁵⁶ In Hungary, László Rajk, who had been General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party, and at the time of his arrest was foreign minister, was hanged in 1949. In the course of numerous beatings, he refused to confess to the imaginary crimes of which he was accused – they included conspiring with Tito to have the Hungarian leadership assassinated – but in the end confessed at the trial.

Among those who took part in questioning Rajk was the person who succeeded him as Minister of the Interior, János Kádár, acting on the instructions of Mátyás Rákosi, the party leader. Although Kádár, who was later to lead the Hungarian party for many years, was sometimes said to have played a decisive role in getting Rajk to confess to imaginary crimes, more recent research suggests that was an exaggeration. Nevertheless, he helped to deprive Rajk of hope that he would get a fair hearing even from people in the leadership from whom he might have expected sympathy.⁵⁷ While all party leaders were under pressure to prove their total loyalty to Moscow, lest they be not only replaced but eliminated, the choice of local victims left a degree of discretion to the top leaders of each national party. Rákosi took the opportunity to get rid of potential rivals. Communists who had remained in their own countries, rather than having spent years in Moscow, were especially dangerous in the eyes both of the ‘Muscovites’ in these parties and of Stalin and the Soviet security organs. Kádár was one such ‘national Communist’, and in 1951, just eighteen months after he had been prevailed upon to witness the execution of Rajk, he was arrested.⁵⁸ Broken by interrogation, Kádár confessed, later retracted his confession, and then, under further duress, confessed again. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but released from jail in July 1954, more than a year after Stalin’s death. Having experienced imprisonment as a Communist in the 1930s under a right-wing authoritarian Hungarian regime, Kádár wrote to Rákosi at the time of his release: ‘If I could choose my fate, I would always rather spend twelve years as a Communist in the jail of a capitalist country than spend twelve months in the jail of my own people’s republic. Unfortunately, I had reason to compare them – the two are not the same, they defy comparison.’⁵⁹

Rákosi shared Stalin’s suspicions of Communists who had spent the war years underground in their own country and, in general, was zealous in trying to root out unreliable leading party members not only in Hungary but also elsewhere in Eastern Europe. In the trial of Rajk and other Hungarian Communists, Rákosi decided, however, that seven death sentences was excessive and wrote to Stalin that he thought three would be enough, though the first of the three he named was Rajk. Stalin replied that he had no objection to what Rákosi was proposing, but he agreed that Rajk must be put to death, ‘for the people would understand no other verdict’.⁶⁰ Rákosi went on to play a vigorous part in ‘internationalizing’ the Rajk affair. He sent leaders of other Communist parties a list of 526 people whose names had emerged during the Rajk investigations. By far the largest group in that list was from Czechoslovakia–353 citizens of that country.⁶¹

Rákosi’s list included thirty-three Romanians, but even before he produced it, several leading Communists had been arrested in Romania in 1948. Among them there was at least one who was a nationalistic Communist, Lucreiu Ptrcanu – he was executed in 1954. Later, when the arrests had taken an anti-semitic turn, the Foreign Minister Ana Pauker, who had represented Romania at the Cominform meeting which expelled Yugoslavia from the organization, was in 1952 herself arrested, although she received the relatively light punishment of several years under house arrest. In Poland there were no executions of Communists, even though in the person of Gomuka, the security forces had a strong candidate for a national deviationist. He lost his position as general secretary of the party and was indeed accused of right-wing nationalist deviations, and imprisoned for three years, but – against the odds, given the atmosphere in Communist Europe at the time – he survived.⁶² He had led the underground Polish Communist resistance during World War Two, and though this had been on a much smaller scale than Tito’s Partisans, he had established his position of authority independently of Moscow. He had also accepted the need for an accommodation with the Catholic Church in Poland and, on similar tactical grounds, not to undertake the collectivization of agriculture. The mildness of the Polish purge, which the Soviet leadership tolerated, may have owed much to the weakness of the party within Polish society, combined with the Poles’ proven willingness to fight, even against overwhelming odds. It also reflected unwillingness on the part of some Polish leaders, including Bolesław Bierut, a former Comintern agent who had succeeded Gomuka as general secretary of the Polish party in 1948, to add further killings of Polish Communists to those already perpetrated at Stalin’s behest in the Soviet Union prior to World War Two.⁶³

While in a majority of Communist countries there were executions of suspect Communists at the end of the 1940s and in the early 1950s, they were not on the scale of the Soviet Great Purge of the 1930s. In the other sense of the term, ‘purge’, namely removal from the Communist Party – political as distinct from physical death – they were, however, massive. Even in East Germany, where no leading Communists were arrested, the party was reduced in size from two million members in 1948 to 1.2 million in 1951, with former members of the German Social Democratic Party the most affected.⁶⁴ In Eastern Europe as a whole, approximately one in every four members of a Communist party suffered some form of persecution in the years between 1948 and 1953.⁶⁵

Although Czechoslovakia was the last of the European states to become Communist (in 1948), it was the one in which repression was most severe. This may have been a Stalinist tribute to the very strength of Czech democracy. No country in central Europe was more democratic between the wars than Czechoslovakia, and in the first three post-war years political pluralism had been preserved, even though the Communists had the largest and strongest political party. A party with a larger than normal share of the population within its ranks, and one having mass support, was also less easy to control from Moscow. The work of Russian researchers, once the archives became more open after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, has confirmed how central to Stalin’s thinking in those post-war years was the insistence not only that all East European countries subordinate their foreign policy to that emanating from the Soviet Union but that they model their Communist parties on the Soviet party, expelling all members who showed any sign of thinking differently, especially any who could be tarred with the brush of Rajk or Tito.⁶⁶

The political trials directed against Communists themselves in Czechoslovakia took two forms. There was the repression of ‘national Communists’, especially Slovaks, following the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform. It was not difficult to find Slovak Communists who could be suspected of national deviation. And there was the repression which reflected the intensified anti-semitism emanating from the Kremlin. The most notorious case of this throughout the whole of Eastern Europe was the Slánský trial of 1952. Rudolf Slánský was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from 1945 until 1951, when he was demoted to the post of deputy prime minister. Unusually, the general secretaryship did not mean that he was the number one Communist. That person was Klement Gottwald, who by the time of Slánský’s arrest was both chairman of the party and president of the country. Slánský, however, had been in second place and was a potential rival to Gottwald. He had been critical of the moderation of the party’s policy between 1945 and 1948, hinting that power should have been seized immediately after the war, and that there had been no need to reach a compromise with bourgeois parties.⁶⁷ The choice of Slánský to be the Czech equivalent of the leading Hungarian Communist purge victim, Rajk, was, ultimately, that of Moscow rather than Prague. On his fiftieth birthday on 31 July 1951, Slánský was awarded the Order of Socialism in Czechoslovakia and lauded by Gottwald, although he was careful to remove from the draft eulogy some of the superlatives as well as the phrase stating that Slánský was among Gottwald’s most faithful colleagues.⁶⁸ He was praised also by the third member of the leading triumvirate within the party, Antonín Zápotocý. Congratulations came from other Communist countries, but ominously, there was silence from Moscow, where, traditionally, a great fuss was made of birthdays of political figures in good standing.

Slánský was arrested in November 1951 and eventually brought to trial as one of fourteen leading Communists one year later. Gottwald had been somewhat reluctant to authorize his arrest, but in the end approved it. He was presented with testimony against Slánský which had been obtained from other leading Communists who had worked with him. This had, of course, been given under duress. Ultimately, however, it was the Soviet leader, not the President of Czechoslovakia, who had the decisive word, although if Gottwald had been a Tito, he could have refused to give way. According to testimony given to an investigation of the trials by a commission of inquiry during the ‘Prague Spring’, Gottwald assented only under pressure from Anastas Mikoyan and Stalin. Mikoyan arrived in Prague on 11 November 1951 to convey Stalin’s view that Slánský should be arrested right away. When Gottwald continued to hesitate, Mikoyan broke off his meeting with him and telephoned Stalin from the Soviet embassy. When he returned, he said that Stalin ‘insisted on his view and reminded Gottwald of his grave responsibility’. The Czech commission in 1968, composed of leading members of the Communist Party (but operating in an atmosphere of growing freedom), observed: ‘Although he had no facts, Gottwald ultimately drew the conclusion that Stalin, as usual, had reliable information and that his advice was sound. He sent back a message through Mikoyan agreeing to Slánský’s arrest.’⁶⁹

Eleven of the fourteen convicted in the Slánský trial were of Jewish origin, and this fact was emphasized. The Soviet advisers wanted to list the eleven as being of ‘Jewish nationality’, Jews being classified as a nationality within the Soviet Union. This, however, was one piece of advice which was not followed to the letter. The eleven were described as of ‘Czech nationality, Jewish origin’.⁷⁰ Among the non-Jews who stood trial along with Slánský was the Slovak Vladimír Clementis, who had succeeded Jan Masaryk in 1948 as Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia. Of the fourteen accused men, eleven (who included Slánský and Clementis), were sentenced to death in late November 1952 and were hanged one week later. The remaining three defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment.

A number of the accused had committed crimes for which they were not charged – in particular, being responsible for the arrest and, in some cases, execution of innocent non-Communists. However, the charges to which they confessed, following months of interrogation, were a Stalinist fantasy. Taken together, they were ‘Trotskyist-zionist-titoist-bourgeois-nationalist traitors, spies and saboteurs, enemies of the Czechoslovak nation, of its people’s democratic order, and of socialism’. The confessions were obtained by a variety of means, including, in some cases, violence, threats of torture of their wives and children, and actual torture of some of those who gave false evidence against them. Not only did these leading members of the Communist Party then confess to the imaginary crimes, but several of them requested the death sentence, so that others might be deterred from following their terrible example.⁷¹ Other trials of Communists followed in Czechoslovakia, including, as late as 1954 (and thus, after the deaths not only of Stalin but also of Gottwald, who died immediately after attending Stalin’s funeral in March 1953), that of prominent Slovak Communists accused of ‘bourgeois nationalist’ tendencies. Among them was Gustáv Husák, who had been a major figure in the Slovak ‘national rising’ of 1944. He was arrested in 1951, and at his trial three years later was sentenced to life imprisonment. Although released in 1960, he had thus spent nine years in prison. (In 1969, half a year after Soviet tanks had put an end to the ‘Prague Spring’, Husák, in another twist to his circuitous career, was to become Communist Party leader and, subsequently, President of Czechoslovakia.)

The purpose of these trials of leading party members was to reinforce iron discipline within the international Communist movement, and especially to ensure that conformity with the line emanating from Moscow prevailed in all the ruling parties. The form taken by the repression made clear that no one was safe from retribution, least of all any Communist with international links other than with the Soviet Union. In several of the countries, veterans of the Spanish Civil War were among those imprisoned. The trials were also meant to underline Stalin’s view that Jews, who had been disproportionately well represented in almost all the parties, should be regarded as potentially unreliable holders of the highest party and state offices. This was intended also to strengthen support for the Communists by appealing to popular anti-semitism. That was more effective in some countries than others and varied even within the same state. In the Czech lands, as distinct from Slovakia, anti-semitism had not been a strong current. By pointing to the activities of ‘saboteurs’, the trials were also offering a reason why overoptimistic economic targets had not been met.

At the same time the trials were meant to strike further fear into the heart of the populations as a whole. They accompanied a militarization of the economies and a war psychosis in which the prospect of Cold War, which had existed from the earliest post-war years, turning to hot war had by the early 1950s become a more serious threat. Actual war was already being waged in Korea, and east-central Europeans were being psychologically prepared for armed conflict with the principal imperialist enemy, the United States. Tito’s rejection of Soviet hegemony also played its part in bringing about the arrest of East European Communists. It had driven Stalin to more severe measures to ensure that the Yugoslav example would not be followed elsewhere. Soviet advisers with long NKVD/MGB experience helped throughout the region to prepare the trials and to write the scripts of the Communist victims of Communist terror. The defendants had to learn these scripts, and after their resistance was broken, they were rehearsed until they knew their lines by heart. When the judge in the Slánský trial missed one of the questions, Rudolf Slánský answered the omitted question as programmed.⁷²

These were trials of people who had been raised to the pinnacle of power by the Communist takeovers in Eastern Europe. The court cases were given huge publicity, and their impact was especially dramatic. However, the number of non-Communists repressed in Eastern Europe between the Communists coming to power and the death of Stalin vastly exceeded that of the Communist victims. Quite apart from the tens of thousands who were arrested, several million people across Eastern Europe lost their jobs because of their class origin or non-Communist political activism. ‘Bourgeois’ professors, for example, were hounded out of the universities. As with the repressed Communists, people with non-Soviet international links were especially suspect. That category included, once again, Jews, but also transnational organizations such as the Boy Scouts, which were banned. Many thousands of people were deported from the capital cities of Eastern Europe.

The Churches were persecuted, to varying degrees, in all the Communist countries. Even though the Catholic Church was treated with more circumspection in Poland than elsewhere, that did not prevent the arrest of a number of priests in 1952 on spurious spying charges, and in February 1953 a bishop and three priests were given lengthy prison sentences for ‘anti-state and anti-people activities’. Under pressure from the Communist authorities, the episcopate condemned the four men, but Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski refused to do so, and as a result was himself placed under arrest later in 1953.⁷³ In all other Communist countries the persecution of the Church was greater. In Albania an attempt was made to eliminate religious organizations entirely. Among those arrested throughout Communist Europe were peasants and farmers who had opposed collectivization. Many of the victims were made to do dangerous work, ranging from building canals to working in uranium mines. So far as the number of political prisoners is concerned, it is reckoned that in Romania, for example, in the early 1950s it amounted to 180,000 people; estimates of those imprisoned for political reasons between 1948 and 1954 in Czechoslovakia range from 150,000 to 200,000.⁷⁴

From the ‘Leningrad Affair’ to the ‘Doctors’ Plot’

In the Soviet Union itself there were purges in the late 1940s and early 1950s, albeit on a much smaller scale than the 1930s. Within the Communist Party the most important repression was of the so-called Leningrad group. The most prominent Leningrad Communist, Zhdanov, who died a natural death in 1948, had been seen as a rival by the secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, and by Georgy Malenkov. In 1946 he had succeeded the latter as the secretary of the Central Committee overseeing the party organization. Zhdanov’s death left exposed Aleksey Kuznetsov, who had been his deputy in the city and regional party organization throughout the Second World War. From 1946 until 1949 Kuznetsov was a secretary of the Central Committee of the party, in which role he had, as already noted, partial responsibility for the security organs. That made him a potential rival of Beria, the godfather within the government of the secret police. Like Stalin, Beria was from Georgia, and although that was no guarantee of support, Beria did have influence over the Soviet leader and he knew how to feed his chronic suspicion. Thus, Kuznetsov’s party responsibilities provided neither the power nor the protection they would have afforded someone in that position throughout most of the Soviet period. Khrushchev, in his memoirs, suggested that it was Beria and Malenkov who poisoned Stalin’s mind against Kuznetsov and against the other leading Leningrader in the party leadership, Nikolay Voznesensky. In his 1956 speech to the Party Congress, Khrushchev had blamed Beria and the MGB chairman, Viktor Abakumov, not mentioning Malenkov – for the good reason that Malenkov at the time was still in the party leadership. In that speech Khrushchev said:

    As is known, Voznesensky and Kuznetsov were talented and eminent leaders. Once they stood very close to Stalin. It is sufficient to mention that Stalin made Voznesensky first deputy to the chairman of the Council of Ministers and Kuznetsov was elected secretary of the Central Committee. The very fact that Stalin entrusted Kuznetsov with the supervision of the state security organs shows the trust he enjoyed.⁷⁵

But, said Khrushchev, the ‘elevation of Voznesensky and Kuznetsov alarmed Beria’ and so he fabricated declarations and anonymous letters which led to them, and the others who were caught up in the ‘Leningrad Affair’, being branded as ‘enemies of the people’ and subsequently liquidated.⁷⁶ That it was Beria, in particular, and Malenkov who played an important part in turning Stalin against the Leningraders is supported by the evidence of Dmitry Shepilov, who was very much an insider at the time. Shepilov was first deputy head of the Department of Propaganda and Agitation of the Central Committee from 1947 to 1948, working with Zhdanov. Following Zhdanov’s death, he became head of that department. Beria and Malenkov conspired against Shepilov also, and he was dismissed from the Central Committee apparatus in July 1949, but spared the fate of the Leningrad group. In posthumously published memoirs, Shepilov wrote that there were times when Stalin seemed to favour Voznesensky above everyone else, and that was ‘enough reason to set the blades of Beria’s infernal machine against him’.⁷⁷

Men like Voznesensky and Kuznetsov were younger high officials, loyal to Stalin, who had distinguished themselves during the war. Beria and Malenkov perceived them as threats to their power and prospects. Stalin, though Chairman of the Council of Ministers, did not like to conduct its formal meetings, and after Voznesensky had been appointed first deputy chairman, he was the person who presided over its Bureau. This was uncongenial to Malenkov, who had hopes of becoming Stalin’s successor – and, for a very brief period, succeeded. Voznesensky had also antagonized Beria by refusing to sign off on a long list of people who should be shot, when it was sent to him by the political police chief. He told one of his aides, who recounted the story: ‘I am not a judge and I don’t know whether the people on the list need to be shot. And tell them never to send such lists to me again.’⁷⁸ If the list had come from Stalin, Voznesensky would have found it much harder to decline to append his signature, but for Beria his refusal was an affront that would not be forgotten.

Khrushchev claims that there would have been a ‘Moscow Affair’, with many people executed, as well as a ‘Leningrad Affair’, but for him. Soon after he was recalled from Ukraine to Moscow at the end of 1949 to be first secretary of the city, he rejected as the work of a provocateur a letter shown to him by Stalin, which stated that his predecessor in Moscow and many of the district secretaries and factory managers in the capital were conspiring against the Central Committee.⁷⁹ However, Khrushchev’s contention is very dubious. Stalin set up a commission consisting of Malenkov, Beria, Kaganovich and Mikhail Suslov to investigate the charges against the Moscow Party first secretary, Georgy Popov. They found the letter (which Stalin showed to Khrushchev) to be a standard anonymous denunciation and the most serious charges in it invented, as were the names of the ‘three engineers’ who had supposedly written it.⁸⁰ Stalin had taken the opportunity, however, to demote Popov (to a ministerial position) and to bring Khrushchev from Ukraine to Moscow as a counterweight to Malenkov and Beria, since the removal of the Leningraders had left them potentially more powerful.⁸¹

No one, however, came to the defence of the Leningrad officials. Kuznetsov and Voznesensky were both arrested, tortured, and executed in 1950, along with many other leading figures from the Leningrad party organization.⁸² One Leningrader who had a very narrow escape was Aleksey Kosygin, who went on to play a major role in Soviet politics in the 1960s and 1970s (when he was Chairman of the Council of Ministers for sixteen years). Of Kosygin in 1950 Khrushchev writes:

    …his life was hanging by a thread. Men who had been arrested and condemned in Leningrad made ridiculous accusations against him in their testimonies. They wrote all kinds of rot about him. Kosygin was on shaky ground from the beginning because he was related by marriage to Kuznetsov. Even though he’d been very close to Stalin, Kosygin was suddenly released from all his posts and assigned to work in some ministry. The accusations against him cast such a dark shadow over him that I simply can’t explain how he was saved from being eliminated along with the others. Kosygin, as they say, must have drawn a lucky lottery ticket, and this cup passed from him.⁸³

The repression of Stalin’s last years affected tens of thousands of people who were far removed from the party leadership. Often it was enough to be the son of ‘an enemy of the people’ – a child of one of those incarcerated for no good reason in the 1930s – for that person to be arrested and sent to a labour camp. The growing anti-semitism under late Stalinism, the effects of which in Eastern Europe have already been discussed, also had dire consequences for many Soviet citizens of Jewish origin. There was a campaign against what was called ‘cosmopolitanism’, directed against all foreign influences and linkages but in particular at those citizens deemed by Stalin to be archetypal ‘cosmopolitans’, namely the Jews. Marxist-Leninist ideology could not be twisted to such an extent as to embrace overt anti-semitism, and thus, when it was deployed as a weapon in the Soviet Union, it was in the guise of attacking cosmopolitanism or Zionism.

Soon after the German attack had brought the Soviet Union into the Second World War, one of the organizations officially sanctioned in Moscow was a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, on which prominent Soviet Jews were glad to serve. In November 1948 that body was abolished and accused of being a centre of anti-Soviet propaganda and, still worse, of providing ‘anti-Soviet information to foreign intelligence services’.⁸⁴ The committee chairman, Solomon Mikhoels, an outstanding actor and director, was killed in 1948 at Stalin’s behest, as were a number of other prominent Soviet Jews.⁸⁵ The Yiddish theatre in Moscow, which had been directed by Mikhoels, was shut down. Among those arrested was Mikhail Borodin, the Comintern’s talented envoy to China, and close associate of Sun Yat-sen (whose early career has been observed in Chapter 5). The English-language Soviet publication of which he was editor at the time, Moscow News, was closed down in January 1949 (resuscitated only in 1956), and Borodin was arrested in March. He died in captivity two years later.⁸⁶

The final manifestation of anti-semitism in Stalin’s Soviet Union, and also of the increasing paranoia of Stalin, took the form of the ‘doctors’ plot’. A cardiogram specialist, Lydia Timashuk, who had been involved in the care of Zhdanov, wrote several letters after Zhdanov’s death in August 1948 claiming that she had been forced to change the wording of her report on the latter’s condition and implying that the doctors treating him had wilfully hastened his death.⁸⁷ Timashuk was used by the MGB – she paid two visits to their headquarters in 1952–and by Stalin to launch a campaign against those whom Stalin, at the beginning of December 1952, called ‘Jewish nationalists’, who believed that ‘their nation has been saved by the United States’. He added: ‘Among the doctors there are many Jewish nationalists.’⁸⁸ Over the two previous months some of the most prominent doctors in the Soviet Union – who had treated the country’s leaders, including Stalin – had been arrested. They were tortured to secure confessions, and on 13 January 1953, Pravda made public the arrest of a ‘group of saboteur-doctors’. The same issue of the paper published an editorial – drafted by Shepilov (by this time restored to favour as chief editor of Pravda) and amended by Stalin personally – beneath the heading ‘Base spies and killers masked as professor-doctors’.⁸⁹ Six of the nine were Jews. The reports linked them with international Jewish bourgeois organizations and with American intelligence. Opinion remains divided on whether the doctors were being prepared for a show trial, comparable to those of the 1930s and that of Slánský in Czechoslovakia. It is possible that Stalin had in mind one more Great Purge, which would have involved many more Jews, but would also have ranged more widely. However, no evidence of that has emerged from the archives, and in general, Stalin pursued a more cautious policy in the post-war years, preferring the closed trial – as in the case of the Anti-Fascist Committee members – to the theatrical show trial.⁹⁰ Following Stalin’s death in March 1953, the doctors were all cleared of the absurd charges against them.

Science and the Arts

The post-war Stalin years were a dismal time for the Soviet arts, and for many but not all of the sciences. Mathematics and physics, for example, flourished. This was partly because they could not be understood by those at the top of the party hierarchy or in the political police, but it was also because conscious priority had been given to physics in particular. Stalin was desperate to achieve nuclear parity, or better, with the United States and wanted the first Soviet atomic bomb as early as possible. Nuclear physicists were, accordingly, given generous resources and privileged living conditions. The first Soviet atomic bomb was successfully tested on 29 August 1949 in the steppes of Kazakhstan. Beria, who was chairman of the commission responsible for work on the bomb, arrived at the test site, and his presence was a reminder to the scientists involved, starting with their leader, Igor Kurchatov, that their personal fates were bound up in the success of the project. As a mushroom cloud formed above the test site, Beria embraced Kurchatov and another leading physicist, Yuly Khariton, and kissed them on the forehead.⁹¹ Given the times, Khariton was vulnerable on many counts if things had gone wrong for the project. He was Jewish and had spent two years in Britain, taking his doctorate in physics at Cambridge in 1928. His father had been arrested in 1940 in Latvia by the NKVD and his mother had moved to Palestine with her second husband. Like most of the scientists involved, Khariton felt relief not only on personal grounds but also because they had solved the problem they had been set. Moreover, whatever Stalin or Beria may have had in mind, the scientists saw the advent of Soviet nuclear weapons in terms of deterrence. Khariton said that the successful test made him happy, because ‘in possessing such a weapon we had removed the possibility of its being used against the USSR with impunity’.⁹²

Other areas of Soviet science suffered from the presence of charlatans and of the illusion of Stalin and some of his associates that they understood the essence of the subject. A scientist much favoured by Stalin, Trofim Lysenko, played an enormous role in destroying genetics as a scientific discipline in the Soviet Union. He gained Stalin’s approval for his assertion that it was incompatible with Marxism-Leninism – approval also for various quack experiments designed to demonstrate the validity of an extreme environmentalism. In Shepilov’s words, ‘Lysenko and his circle dismissed all preceding advances in genetics…as idealist notions and bourgeois inventions.’⁹³ At the end of the 1940s, thousands of geneticists and also plant biologists were dismissed from their teaching or research positions. Before long, the quest for ideological orthodoxy spread to other sciences, including astronomy, chemistry and ethnography. The stress on eliminating ‘cosmopolitan’ influences was accompanied by generally fanciful claims concerning the discoveries and inventions of Russians in practically every sphere of scientific activity.⁹⁴

In cinema, the theatre and literature, a fantasy world of plenty in the Soviet Union was portrayed. Many works were devoted to the glorification of Stalin. A compulsory optimism – especially faith in the ultimate victory of ‘socialism’, as defined by the Soviet leadership – and ‘party-mindedness’ (partiynost’) were demanded of all who worked in the creative arts. It may be that cinema-goers were relieved to see a film such as The Cossacks of Kuban, made in 1948, which showed the joyous life of peasants in southern Russia and tables laden with food. For some city-dwellers this was probably welcome escapist entertainment. When, however, a young Czech Communist, Zdenk Mlyná, saw the film with his Moscow University friend Mikhail Gorbachev in the early 1950s, it was Gorbachev, a native of the part of Russia portrayed in the film, who told him how utterly removed from the reality of rural life it was. In literature, the ‘varnishing of reality’ in the last years of Stalin’s life was taken to such lengths that these works were, in the main, rapidly and deservedly forgotten in the years that followed.⁹⁵

Stalin’s Death

Stalin suffered a severe stroke on 1 March 1953 and died on 5 March. It is unlikely that prompt and efficient medical attention could have saved him, but in the event, the best doctors in Moscow were in the cells of the Lubyanka (the political police headquarters) and there was a delay in getting Stalin any attention at all. The medical team who did attend him were alarmed by his condition. His colleagues in the party leadership badly needed to know whether there was any chance that he would recover. No one would dare take control even on an interim basis if there was a possibility of Stalin suddenly reviving. Thus, the former Kremlin doctors who had just undergone weeks of torture were, to their great surprise, approached and Stalin’s symptoms described to them. Their judgement that his condition was ‘grave’ strengthened Beria and Malenkov in their desire to take charge. The imprisoned medical specialists’ opinion confirmed the view of the doctors who had attended Stalin, and by 3 March the Bureau of the Presidium of the Central Committee were told that he had no chance of recovering. That very day they agreed that Malenkov should become Chairman of the Council of Ministers, while retaining his secretaryship of the Central Committee. This decision was endorsed by an emergency session of the Central Committee held the next day. It was opened by Malenkov, who told the members that Stalin was seriously ill. He was followed by Beria, who proposed that Malenkov should takeover Stalin’s duties.⁹⁶ It was 6 March, the day after Stalin expired, before the Soviet mass media announced the death.

Stalin’s body lay in state, and so many hundreds of thousands tried to see it that an unknown number of people were crushed or trampled to death in the crowds. According to Khrushchev, speaking to Polish Communists in March 1956, the death toll was 109.⁹⁷ Once someone being swept along in the dense crowd slipped on the ice, there was no hope of getting up.⁹⁸ The great majority of people in the Soviet Union regretted Stalin’s passing. Even the eminent physicist and future dissident Andrey Sakharov ‘mourned the great man’s death’.⁹⁹ Among the numerous encomia published in Pravda were tributes from writers. Aleksandr Fadeev (the head of the Writers’ Union, who killed himself in 1956 following Khrushchev’s exposure of some of Stalin’s crimes) described the dead leader as ‘the greatest humanitarian the world has ever known’. Mikhail Sholokhov, author of The Quiet Don, wrote: ‘Father, farewell! Farewell, our own and, to our last breath, beloved father!…You will always be with us, and with those who come after us.’ From France, Louis Aragon declared that Stalin was the ‘great teacher whose mind, knowledge, and example nurtured our party, the party of Maurice Thorez’. Thousands of France’s sons, he said, ‘died in the cause of liberty with the names of Stalin and France on their lips!’ The editor of Pravda, Dmitry Shepilov, to whom these and thousands of other tributes were addressed, had mixed feelings at the time, but later wrote: ‘For Stalin, in the final period of his life, the exposure of “terrorists”, “poisoners”, and “conspirators” became as vital as vodka to a hardened alcoholic.’¹⁰⁰ However, among Communists across the world (with the principal exception of those in Yugoslavia), the mourning was genuine. They had identified the party and the international movement so much with Stalin that some dared to wonder if things could ever be the same again.