The immediate aftermath of Stalin’s death saw intense rivalry among the most forceful members of the Politburo. This succession struggle also became a test of the power of different institutions. Lavrenti Beria was Commissar of Internal Affairs between 1938 and 1945, and from 1941 to 1953 he was a deputy head of government with some responsibility for the security organs. The most odious member of Stalin’s top leadership team, he could hardly conceal his satisfaction when Stalin died, and he quickly set out to consolidate his position. The Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and the Ministry of State Security (MGB) were amalgamated, with Beria in direct charge of both. However, the person who had ranked next to Stalin on the eve of his death was Georgy Malenkov, the de facto second secretary of the Communist Party supervising the party apparatus. He, too, showed a keen interest in becoming the new supreme leader and seemed well placed to do so, given that in addition to his high party position he was a deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers.
Another member of the Politburo who was seen as a potential successor to Stalin was Vyacheslav Molotov, a significant Politburo member since the 1920s. Although he had been out of favour with the vozhd’ at the time of Stalin’s death, his colleagues brought him (and also Mikoyan) back into their inner circle during the several days when Stalin was in a coma. Molotov appears to have agreed with most of Stalin’s policies not only out of prudence but also on principle. Indeed, he helped to shape Stalin’s foreign policy. He did not, however, actively seek the top political post following Stalin’s death. Beria, Malenkov and Molotov were the three orators at Stalin’s funeral, with Molotov the only one of them who appeared genuinely upset. To onlookers it appeared as if they would be the ruling triumvirate.1
Beria, though, may well have guessed that if he were not to be in full personal charge, he would be a target for reprisal, given his central role in all the post-war repressions. He was ready to use Malenkov as the nominal new leader, believing that he could outwit and replace him in due course. With his massive police powers, Beria bugged, as a matter of course, the telephones and homes of the other leaders. Several hundred thousand security troops came under his command, as did the border guards and the labour camps.2 In addition to being in charge of the unified political police and ordinary police, Beria became on 5 March 1953 a first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers. Malenkov was appointed chairman. Moreover, in a surprise tactic, Beria presented himself as something of a reformer, hinting at a softer line both at home and towards Eastern Europe. He appeared to be ready even to accept a unified, neutral and non-Communist Germany.3 He also spoke in favour of the heads of all Soviet republics being nationals of that republic, and of stronger support for the language of the titular nationality of the republic. None of this meant that Beria was any kind of closet liberal. Rather, he was a highly authoritarian politician with an especially murderous past who was trying to broaden his appeal. As a non-Russian himself, he may have believed, with his proposal to make concessions to the non-Russian republics, that he could draw support from these other nationalities who, taken together, comprised roughly half of the Soviet population.4
One thing which Beria, Malenkov and Molotov had in common was that they all underestimated Nikita Khrushchev. Born into a poor peasant household in southern Russia, Khrushchev had at most four years of schooling. (His own accounts of how long he was able to study at elementary school varied between two and four years.) From an early age he worked on the land, and then in a factory and mine, before becoming a revolutionary. He was one of the socially and educationally deprived whom the Bolshevik revolution set on a path of upward political mobility. To the end of his days, Khrushchev rarely put pen to paper, but preferred to dictate – and invariably did so when he held high political office. He had no problem with reading, but he did not wish to undermine his authority by displaying his inability to spell. Lack of education and lack of intelligence are, however, very different things. Khrushchev had plenty of native wit, a prodigious memory, political shrewdness, and what many who worked with him called ‘peasant cunning’. He was also a true believer in building a communist society. (All leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – except, in the second half of his period as party leader, Mikhail Gorbachev – were concerned to sustain, and extend internationally, the Communist system. But only Lenin and Khrushchev, the latter in his own peculiar fashion, believed in Marx’s ‘withering-away of the state’. Even Stalin had to pay lip-service to the building of ‘communism’, but hardly believed in a future stateless society, although he accepted many other tenets of Marxism and Leninism.) These varied characteristics of Khrushchev emerge in his memoirs – dictated at his dacha several years after he had been removed from political office. By that time every room in his home was bugged, and the Communist Party leadership were extremely anxious to prevent his memoirs being published. His son, however, was able to arrange for a set of tapes to survive the close attentions of the KGB and make their way abroad. The memoirs were published around the world, although not in the Soviet Union until late in the Gorbachev era.5
Having dinner with Stalin was always an ordeal, Khrushchev notes in those memoirs, for he plied the members of his inner circle with an excess of alcohol and then watched and listened closely for signs of the slightest disloyalty or political error. He did not hesitate to humiliate them or to show who was boss. On one occasion, Khrushchev, who readily admitted in his retirement to being one of the world’s worst dancers, was told by Stalin to perform the gopak, a Ukrainian folk dance which involves the dancer getting down on his haunches and kicking his legs out. ‘Which frankly wasn’t very easy for me’, the rotund Khrushchev recalled with some understatement. ‘But’, he says, ‘I did it and I tried to keep a pleasant expression on my face. As I later told Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan, “When Stalin says dance, a wise man dances.”’6 Khrushchev could cope with such ordeals and even turn compulsory socializing with Stalin (whom he portrays as lonely as well as vindictive) to his own advantage. As he also recalled:
If there was anything worse than having dinner with Stalin, it was having to go on a vacation with him. To have dinner with him or to go on vacation with him was, of course, a great honor. But it was also a terrible physical strain…The friendliest relations always had to be demonstrated outwardly. You had to make this sacrifice. But putting up with the ordeal had its rewards and advantages, too. Conversations were always going on which you could use profitably and from which you could draw useful conclusions for your own purposes.7
On his way to the top of the Soviet political hierarchy Khrushchev, too, had authorized numerous arrests – which in many cases meant executions – in the course of zealously demonstrating his Stalinist credentials in Ukraine. His attitude to Stalin combined elements of admiration, revulsion and guilt. He was impressed by Stalin’s abilities, but ultimately revolted by his methods, especially the annihilation of fellow Communists. His feelings of guilt derived from the active part he had played in the repression, especially in Ukraine, while demonstrating utter loyalty to Stalin and surviving physically and politically himself. Khrushchev was a naturally spontaneous, indeed impulsive, person, but he was able to keep his emotions in check when this was necessary for political advancement. Once he had became the most powerful politician in the Soviet Union, the spontaneity and impulsiveness were given fuller scope – for better, and for worse.
Communist regimes have often been described as party-states, and the description makes sense, so closely intertwined were party institutions and governmental structures. Yet official Communist doctrine was generally misleading or ambiguous about this. On the one hand, the party was accorded a monopoly of political power – supposedly exercising it from the 1920s to the end of the 1950s, as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ or, later, playing what was more modestly described as the ‘leading role’ within the system. On the other hand, it was also in official theory a public (or social) organization rather than an organ of state power. In fact, for most of the time, paradoxical though it may seem, it was both. The ordinary party member did not wield state power, but belonged to what was the most authoritative ‘public organization’ within the country. At the same time real state power was wielded by the party officials at every level of society – from the district party committee right up to the Politburo. At the top of the political system, the Politburo and Secretariat of the Central Committee were the most powerful collective bodies of all, and the individual who had his hands on the most levers of power was the de facto Communist Party leader. Usually, this person had the title of general or first secretary of the Central Committee, although the top party leader was not called that in every Communist state at all times. Indeed, even when Stalin became general secretary of the party in 1922, Lenin was still universally recognized as the party leader, although he was in day-to-day charge of the government rather than the party organization and his job title was Chairman of Sovnarkom.
The intertwining of party and state was even more conspicuous in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s last dozen years – to the extent that it could appear that some state institutions were more powerful than the Communist Party. Stalin had during the war given himself the title of Generalissimo, and he was head of the armed forces. From 1941, as noted in the previous chapter, he had been Chairman of Sovnarkom – Chairman of the Council of Ministers after that name was adopted instead of ‘Commissars’ in 1946. He remained party leader, but he projected himself much more as the embodiment of the Soviet state than as the head of the party. Although the Communist Party bureaucracy continued to function, with departments of the Central Committee supervising every sphere of activity, including ideology, propaganda and culture, other party institutions had become virtually moribund. The most striking example was the party congress, which, according to the party rules, was the highest policy-making body and was supposed to be convened every three years. (In the post-Stalin era the rules were changed, so that it was due to be held every four years – later at five-yearly intervals.) There was, however, a gap of more than thirteen years between the Eighteenth Congress, held in March 1939, and the Nineteenth, summoned in October 1952. This illustrated the fact that while Stalin needed the party bureaucracy at least as much as he required the ministries and the political police, he was able to treat even the Communist Party with some disdain. Khrushchev observes that when Stalin suggested to members of the Politburo that a party congress be held in 1952, he didn’t need to use any persuasion, since they all thought it ‘incredible’ that there had been such a long gap between congresses.8 While ready to greet the proposal as a splendid idea, not one of them had dared refer to the party rules or point out some years earlier that a party congress was overdue.
At that Nineteenth Congress Stalin changed the name of the Politburo to the Presidium of the Central Committee and substantially increased its size. At the same time he created a secret inner body called the Bureau of the Presidium. Thus, people who were falling out of Stalin’s favour – among them Molotov and Mikoyan – had their names published as being still members of the Presidium, but they were not included in the inner circle. On the evening of 5 March 1953, the day Stalin died, an unprecedented joint meeting of the Central Committee of the party, the Council of Ministers and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR jointly authorized the abolition of the Bureau of the Presidium of the Central Committee and reduced threefold the size of the Presidium, so that it became, in fact, simply the old Politburo under a new name.9 A Politburo minus Stalin, but including a number of very senior Soviet politicians, was, of course, a quite different political institution from the group of men at Stalin’s beck and call who lived in awe and fear of him.
The coming together of party and state bodies on 5 March was soon followed by a greater differentiation between the ministerial and party hierarchies. Malenkov, as already noted, became Chairman of the Council of Ministers, and for just over a week he also remained a secretary of the party Central Committee. He was very soon, however, forced to choose between these functions. On 13 March 1953, he decided in favour of heading the government, giving up his seat on the Central Committee Secretariat. He believed that the chairmanship of the Council of Ministers was the highest office in the land.10 There were precedents, going back to Lenin, for the head of the government to chair meetings of the Politburo, and Malenkov assumed that this position of authority would fall to him, as it did for some time. Moreover, the post of general secretary had been formally abolished by Stalin at the Nineteenth Party Congress in 1952, so that in principle even Stalin was then just one among several secretaries, though the reality was utterly different. This meant, though, that in March 1953 there was not a position of individual pre-eminence in the Communist Party in the way in which there was a slot for just one person at the top of the ministerial hierarchy.
From 1950 a Bureau of the Council of Ministers, consisting of its leading members (but not Stalin, who, as age took its toll, cut back on his commitments), had met weekly to consider major economic issues. Thus, the early prominence of the Council of Ministers following Stalin’s death was in many ways a continuation of a trend which became apparent in the last years of Stalinism. In the immediate post-Stalin period, the highest executive committee of the Council of Ministers was called its Presidium, and that institution, thus named, continued until almost the end of the Soviet era. As we have seen, the inner body of the Central Committee of the Communist Party was called its Presidium (though after the fall of Khrushchev in 1964, the old title of Politburo was brought back in 1966). Between 13 March and the beginning of July 1953, the Presidium of the Council of Ministers met more than three times as often as the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.11 This was an indication that key decisions in that brief period were more often taken in the former body than the latter. In an important sense, however, it did not mean that the monopoly of power of the Communist Party had been usurped, for the leading politicians in the governmental Presidium were party members of long standing who had seats also in the Presidium of the Central Committee.
Nikita Khrushchev was both First Secretary of the Moscow party organization and a secretary of the Central Committee at the time of Stalin’s death. He immediately gave up his Moscow post in order to focus on his work in the Secretariat of the Central Committee. What Khrushchev had realized, much better than Malenkov, was that the party organization was the key political resource which an aspiring political leader had to control. It had been Stalin’s means of rising to his position of pre-eminence, after which, however, he became a dictator over the party as well as over every other institution. Khrushchev set himself the task of revitalizing the party as well as advancing the careers of people he had worked with and whom he regarded as loyal to him. By September 1953 he was strong enough to acquire the title of First Secretary of the Central Committee – the old general secretaryship under a different name. (The title of the party leader reverted to general secretary in 1966.) Although Khrushchev was gradually strengthening his position within the leadership, he did not initially push too far too fast. As late as March 1954, Malenkov was chairing meetings not only of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers but also the Presidium of the Central Committee.12 In the course of the year, that changed. Khrushchev began to preside at those meetings, and his name now appeared before that of Malenkov when the leadership team was listed in Soviet newspapers. Malenkov’s spell as number one in the Soviet leadership lasted for little more than a year, and during that time he was far from being a dominant leader.
The Arrest of Beria
Khrushchev had already asserted his authority by taking the lead in having Beria arrested. He had carefully sounded out the senior members of the Central Committee presidium one by one about removing Beria. ‘What, just remove him?’ was Molotov’s response. ‘After a question like that,’ said Khrushchev, ‘everything was clear, and we talked candidly.’13 Khrushchev was apprehensive about approaching Malenkov, for he had always seemed close to Beria, but eventually he risked it and found that Malenkov, too, was ready to come on board. It was essential to take Beria by complete surprise, for otherwise he could call on the security forces to strike at those who were moving against him. As part of the process of ensuring that Beria got no forewarning, and that his suspicions were not aroused, Khrushchev and his allies had to use the army rather than the police to arrest him. Beria was to get his comeuppance at a meeting of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers on 26 June 1953. The previous evening, after a meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee, Khrushchev, Beria and Malenkov shared the same car on their journey home. After Malenkov had been dropped off, Khrushchev accompanied Beria to his front door and, as he later recounted, ‘complimented him shamelessly’, talking about how Beria had ‘managed to raise such large and valid questions after Stalin’s death’. After an apparently jovial conversation, Khrushchev recalled: ‘I gave him a long and warm handshake. All the time I was thinking, “All right, you bastard, I’m shaking your hand for the last time…Tomorrow, just in case, I will have a gun in my pocket. Who the hell knows what may happen.”’14
The next day, after the last member of the Presidium entered the large Kremlin room in which the meeting was held, armed soldiers took up their positions outside. Malenkov was in the chair and announced that, in addition to the items on the agenda, there was ‘a proposal to discuss the issue of Comrade Beria’. In the words of Dmitry Shepilov, editor of Pravda at that time: ‘The carefully prepared sequence took its course. Lavrentii Beria was told bluntly and angrily everything that he needed to be told: first and foremost, that he was trying to make himself dictator, that he placed the state security services over and above the party and the government, and that he hatched and implemented his own plans.’15 The operation had been a difficult one, for the people who looked after the security of other Presidium members were all answerable to Beria, there were two divisions of the security police in Moscow, the Kremlin guards were under Beria’s command, and even the head of Moscow’s Military District, General Pavel Artemev, was a former NKVD officer. The plotters against Beria arranged, however, for Artemev to be out of Moscow on manoeuvres, and they called in their most senior military allies.16 Khrushchev had telephoned a wartime friend, General Kirill Moskalenko, the chief of Moscow air defences, who was asked to come with some trusted men to the Kremlin for a discussion on air defence. Malenkov and Nikolay Bulganin went one better and recruited Marshal Zhukov. After Khrushchev, Malenkov and others had spoken against Beria – Khrushchev adding to Beria’s real crimes some imaginary ones, such as the claim that at one time he had worked for British intelligence – Malenkov pressed a button and the military men in the next room entered, with guns drawn. Zhukov shouted at a dumbfounded Beria that he was under arrest.17
The same day many of Beria’s closest allies in the state security services were rounded up. They were kept in army prisons until December, when they were brought to court – in Beria’s case in a secret trial, lest he attempt to incriminate any of those who had overthrown him. Although Beria was guilty of countless crimes, the trial itself was in the Stalinist tradition.18 Beria was shot on the same day that the guilty verdict was reached. The contents of his safes provided ample evidence that he had eavesdropped on his leadership colleagues. They also contained the names and addresses of numerous women, among them well-known actresses, and teenage girls he had raped.19 At a meeting of the Central Committee of the party in July 1953, Beria was condemned as ‘an enemy of the Communist Party and the Soviet people’.20 At that stage, the portrayal suggested that he and his henchmen were entirely responsible for all the worst crimes of Stalinism. Beria was accused of trying to usurp power by attempting to elevate the security police above the party and government. Khrushchev presided over the Central Committee plenary session, which lasted from 2 until 7 July, and in one of his numerous interventions he summed up Beria’s personal qualities by saying: ‘Cunning, effrontery and insolence – these are the basic qualities of Beria.’21 Fittingly, Khrushchev’s were the sharpest attacks on Beria at the plenum, since he had been the person bold enough to make the first move against the hated secret police chief.22 One of Khrushchev’s most severe critics, Shepilov, interprets his actions primarily in terms of his ‘inordinate ambition’ to be the country’s leader and his need, accordingly, to dispose of the other person who most aspired to supreme power.23 While this may well have been part of Khrushchev’s motivation, there is no reason to doubt his genuine revulsion at Beria’s methods or his desire to ensure that the Communist Party subordinated the security forces to its will, not the other way round.24
The fact that the Central Committee had been summoned in July 1953 had significance beyond the personal fate of Beria and other political policemen. This was the beginning of the revitalization of the Communist Party, a task to which Khrushchev devoted himself energetically. The Central Committee had met only three times during the last twelve years of Stalin’s life.25 Under Khrushchev it began to meet at least twice a year. According to the party rules, it had a higher authority than its inner body, the Politburo/Presidium. In reality, the Central Committee normally supported whatever was proposed to it by the inner circle of the top leadership. However, at a time when Khrushchev was surrounded by people in the Presidium of the Central Committee who in some cases were his rivals and in no case his personal protégé, it made sense for him to upgrade the actual, as distinct from purely theoretical, authority of the Central Committee. As First Secretary of the Central Committee, he was able to place many of his own supporters within it. Membership of the Central Committee depended on the person’s full-time job. Thus, all first secretaries of the union republics of the Soviet Union belonged to it, as did the first secretaries of a majority of the regions, including the most important industrial and agricultural areas. Most ministers also had Central Committee membership, but it was not only Malenkov, as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, but several other senior members of the Presidium who had a say in their appointment, and so no one in the official government acquired such extensive patronage vis-à-vis the Central Committee as did the party first secretary. Khrushchev set about installing as party bosses in the regions people who had worked with him in the past, while an ally who had been his subordinate in Ukraine, Leonid Brezhnev, became first secretary of Kazakhstan, the second largest of the republics territorially and the third largest in population after Russia and Ukraine. In Ukraine a Khrushchev client, Alexey Kirichenko, was returned to the first secretaryship. At least 35 per cent of the posts carrying Central Committee membership were in the direct gift of Khrushchev.26
Immediately after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev was number five in the Soviet hierarchy. Following the arrest of Beria, he was by July 1953 third in the ranking order, after Malenkov and Molotov. One year later he was number one. Even then, this was still very much a collective leadership with real discussion and disagreement in the Presidium. However, in 1955 Khrushchev was able to increase his power by having Malenkov removed as Chairman of the Council of Ministers and the more pliable Bulganin appointed in his place. By the time of the first post-Stalin party congress, the Twentieth Congress, in February 1956, Khrushchev was quite clearly the dominant personality and the most authoritative political figure in the Soviet leadership. That congress, discussed in a later section of this chapter, represented the great breakthrough towards overt de-Stalinization, but between the arrest of Beria and the congress, significant changes were already taking place.
The Thaw
Stalin’s death led to almost immediate policy innovation in several areas. In foreign policy the change was partial at best, but an important development, and a sign that the new leadership might be less intransigent than Stalin, came in June 1953 when the Korean War was ended as a result of Soviet pressure on China to reach agreement on an armistice. In the same month, however, Soviet tanks were used to put down strikes and demonstrations in East Germany.27 At the time of Stalin’s death, the Soviet foreign minister was Andrey Vyshinsky, who had been the chief prosecutor in the political trials of the 1930s. He had overcompensated for having been a Menshevik (it was as late as 1920 that he joined the Bolsheviks) through consistent ruthlessness as a prosecuting lawyer (as early as the Shakhty trial in 1928) and as Chief Procurator of the USSR between 1935 and 1939. He strongly favoured the use of ferocious methods for procuring confessions. After moving into the field of foreign policy, Vyshinsky spent nine years as a deputy minister and was Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1949 to 1953.
It was only a slight improvement, however, when he was replaced as foreign minister in the latter year by Molotov, returning to his old post. Intransigent in his view of the capitalist West, Molotov was no less implacably opposed to any deviation on the part of Communists, such as had occurred in Yugoslavia. When others in the post-Stalin leadership decided it was time they tried to improve relations with Tito, Molotov’s response, at a meeting of the party Presidium on 19 May 1955, was to say: ‘In 1948 Yugoslavia moved from a position of people’s democracy to one of bourgeois nationalism. Yugoslavia is trying to weaken our camp.’28 At another meeting of the Presidium four days later, he said there were only two kinds of state, proletarian and bourgeois, and asked his colleagues rhetorically: ‘What kind of state is Yugoslavia?’29 For Molotov, the Yugoslavs were evidently in the ‘bourgeois’ camp. At a plenary session of the Central Committee two months later, there was open disagreement between Khrushchev and Molotov, with the former blaming Molotov and Stalin jointly for the break with Yugoslavia.30 It was Molotov who first became known to Western diplomats and foreign ministers as ‘Mr Nyet’, although the sobriquet was later inherited by Andrey Gromyko.
The years immediately after Stalin’s death acquired a name from a famous novella written by Ilya Ehrenburg called The Thaw, which was published in 1954. Although far from a great work of art, it conveyed the miserable state of Soviet culture under Stalin and was suggestive of a new optimism following his demise. All this was done without as much as an explicit mention of Stalin’s death. Ehrenburg was adept at keeping his writing within the realm of the publishable at any given moment in the Soviet Union, but sometimes, as on this occasion, he pushed the limits a little wider. He was attacked both for the contents of his story and for the title – one editor suggested calling it A New Stage – but the author, who had accommodated himself to what was required of a writer in Stalin’s Russia, refused to alter The Thaw, symbolizing, as it did, the perceptible change of political climate in the Soviet Union. One of Ehrenburg’s friends ‘wondered if he had written an entire story solely to inject the title into the country’s vocabulary’.31 Ludmilla Alexeyeva, a longstanding campaigner for human rights in the post-Stalin Soviet Union, in a book which she called The Thaw Generation, noted that ‘a thaw is tenuous’, for a frost could return at any moment. She adds: ‘Its symbolism notwithstanding, The Thaw was a book I read, then forgot all about. I had no inkling that it would give the name to an era.’32
In the absence of open politics, literature became a battleground between writers with different values and of different political dispositions. This had been true of nineteenth-century Russia, and notwithstanding the harsher Soviet censorship and ideological pressures, it was an important feature of Soviet life from the time of Stalin’s death until the late 1980s, by which time real political contestation had largely superseded its literary surrogate. Already in 1953 an important essay entitled ‘On Sincerity in Literature’ by Vladimir Pomerantsev had openly accused the Soviet literary establishment of ‘varnishing reality’. Not only was Pomorantsev attacked for putting sincerity ahead of party-mindedness, but the editor of the journal Novy mir (New World) which had published the article, Alexander Tvardovsky, was dismissed. He was later to return as editor in 1958, and Novy mir was to become the best, and most anti-Stalinist, literary journal throughout the 1960s.
The early post-Stalin thaw included the release of many thousands of political prisoners. Initially, they were mainly old Communists who had fallen foul of Stalin’s machinery of repression.33 There was a distinction between those who were simply released from prison or labour camp before the end of their sentences and those who were formally rehabilitated, with all the charges against them declared to have been false. Prior to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, the overwhelming majority of those who had their punishments reduced, or were freed entirely, were in the former category. The Presidium of the Central Committee of the party set up a central commission to look into the cases of those who had been repressed on political grounds. In the period between then and March 1956 they considered 337,183 victims, and in 153,502 cases they cut the sentences or freed the prisoners immediately.34 In mentioning in his speech to the Twentieth Congress only the 7,679 people who had been fully rehabilitated (many of them posthumously) since 1954, Khrushchev was understating the measures of de-Stalinization which had already occurred.35 Following the Twentieth Congress, ninety-seven regional commissions were set up to investigate trials that had taken place in different parts of the country. Reappraisals of political crimes then proceeded more quickly. As a result, between March and October 1956, over 81,000 people who for political reasons had been condemned to slave labour in the Gulag were released, though only 3,271 of them were fully rehabilitated by a court.36 *
The Soviet leadership themselves, even as they sanctioned releases from the camps, were afraid in the earliest post-Stalin years of things getting out of hand. Khrushchev, in his forced retirement, spoke openly about this:
We in the leadership were consciously in favor of the thaw, myself included, but without naming Ehrenburg by name, we felt we had to criticize his position. We were scared – really scared. We were afraid the thaw might unleash a flood, which we wouldn’t be able to control and which could drown us…We wanted to guide the progress of the thaw so that it would stimulate only those creative forces which would contribute to the strengthening of socialism.37
As a pensioner Khrushchev was more tolerant of cultural diversity than he generally was when in power, observing: ‘What a bore it would be if everybody wrote in exactly the same way, if everybody used the same arguments’, adding in his characteristic style, ‘If there’s too much monotonous cud-chewing in literature, it will make a reader vomit.’38
In the years between 1953 and 1956, Khrushchev was concerned both with ensuring that the Communist system – in his terms, ‘Soviet power’ and ‘socialism’ – was sustained, as well as with advancing and consolidating his own power within that system. He succeeded in asserting the clear supremacy of the party bureaucracy over that of the political police and over the Council of Ministers. In the former case, all the senior members of the Communist Party had a common interest in ensuring that no one should ever again be given as much leeway as Beria had acquired. At a meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee in February 1954, a new delineation of powers between the MVD and a Committee of State Security (KGB) was agreed and formalized in a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet the following month.39 The political police functions went to the KGB, and Khrushchev helped to ensure that they would be loyal to him personally by putting at their head Ivan Serov, who had been the NKVD chief in Ukraine when Khrushchev was first secretary there. Serov’s own record was little better than that of a number of NKVD colleagues who, along with Beria, were shot in 1953.40 There was some opposition to him at the Presidium of the Central Committee session of 8 February 1954 at which he was appointed as KGB chairman. A majority, however, voted for Serov, although he was warned by several presidium members that he must be more party-minded and be aware that the KGB was in essence a branch of the party. Malenkov, who chaired the meeting at which the governmental structures were reorganized, said: ‘We are talking about a major reconstruction (perestroika).’41
During the first two years after Stalin’s death, Malenkov took a more reformist position than did Khrushchev on domestic policy and a softer line on international issues. He supported boosting light industry and doing something for the long-suffering Soviet consumer. This was used against him by Khrushchev, who at that time was championing heavy industry, a policy which appealed to the Soviet military and military industry. (Later, once he had got the better of Malenkov, Khrushchev was to embrace a number of the policies his defeated rival had favoured, including higher investment than hitherto in consumer-goods industry.) In early 1955, Khrushchev widened the attack to undermine Malenkov’s authority more comprehensively. The Chairman of the Council of Ministers was accused of being a weak economic administrator, of being indecisive, and – more damagingly – of having been too close to Beria. He was held to have been morally responsible for the ‘Leningrad affair’, which had led to the deaths of Voznesensky and Kuznetsov, among others, and for many more gross miscarriages of justice. Malenkov was demoted to the much lower governmental post of Minister of Electricity Power Stations. He was given one of the deputy chairmanships of the Council of Ministers and was allowed to retain his seat in the Presidium of the Central Committee.42 This was partly because Khrushchev believed that Malenkov’s support on foreign policy would come in useful against the much harder line taken by Molotov.43
Malenkov was replaced as Chairman of the Council of Ministers by Nikolay Bulganin, an appointment for which there was wide support within the Presidium of the Central Committee. The odd one out was Molotov, who, somewhat surprisingly, proposed that Khrushchev himself become head of the government as well as the Communist Party.44 It was another several months, however, before Khrushchev and Molotov were to clash over Yugoslavia. Meantime, the fact that in the first two years after Stalin’s death Khrushchev had taken a harder line than Malenkov on many issues commended him to Molotov. The clear supremacy of the party over the Council of Ministers was evident from the fact that these decisions were taken in the Presidium of the Central Committee and only later ratified in the Council of Ministers and by the rubber-stamp legislature, the Supreme Soviet. Having succeeded in getting the Presidium to support him against Malenkov, Khrushchev was now ready for the biggest challenge of his political career thus far – the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The Twentieth Congress
The decision to broach the culpability of Stalin was a far from straightforward one for the Soviet leadership. Within the party Presidium there was a sharp division between those who wished to keep criticism of the former leader to a minimum and those, with Khrushchev in the vanguard, who were looking for a more radical de-Stalinization.45 Anastas Mikoyan was very much on Khrushchev’s side on this issue. In the fullest version of his memoirs, published posthumously, Mikoyan gives a many-sided portrayal of Khrushchev, elaborating on both his strengths and his weaknesses. When Khrushchev had taken hold of an idea, he said, he moved forward ‘like a tank’. While the efficacy of that depended on whether he was moving in the right direction, it was an excellent quality for a leader in the struggle for de-Stalinization.46 Molotov, in contrast, had even wished to see in the official Central Committee report to the congress recognition that ‘Stalin was the great continuer of Lenin’s work’.47 He and Kaganovich were the most concerned about the consequences of any debunking of Stalin. Along with Voroshilov, they were against the very idea of the ‘Secret Speech’.48
However, the Presidium had set up a commission in 1955 to look at the reasons for ‘the mass repression of members and candidate members of the Central Committee elected at the 17th Party Congress’. It was chaired by Petr Pospelov, who was both a historian and, from 1953, a secretary of the Central Committee. According to Shepilov, ‘you couldn’t find a more zealous Stalinist’ than Pospelov, and for Mikoyan also, Pospelov was undoubtedly ‘pro-Stalinist’.49 Yet the evidence uncovered by Pospelov and the fellow members of his commission pointed overwhelmingly to Stalin’s guilt and to the innocence of the victims – at least of the crimes of which they were accused. It was their report which provided the factual basis for much of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. Shepilov also contributed material to the speech, but the final version was Khrushchev’s own.50 Mikoyan claims to have been the first person to propose that such a speech be delivered at the Twentieth Congress, but his idea was that it should be given by Pospelov, as chairman of the investigating commission. Khrushchev responded that this was wrong. It would look as if the first secretary was avoiding responsibility for addressing such an important issue. Mikoyan readily accepted that Khrushchev was right and that the significance of the speech would be much greater if it were given by the party leader.51 At a Presidium meeting on 13 February 1956, the decision was taken to have a report on ‘the cult of personality’ presented by Khrushchev at a closed final session of the Twentieth Congress.52
Even though Khrushchev had been acutely worried about the thaw becoming a flood, he risked just such an outcome with the revelations contained in his Secret Speech. The congress began on 14 February 1956, and in the main official report, in open session, delivered by Khrushchev there were coded references to Stalin, such as the Central Committee having ‘resolutely condemned the cult of the individual as alien to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism’.53 There were many unexciting speeches, differentiated from the past by the paucity of references to Stalin, although praise for Stalin from the French Communist guest speaker, Maurice Thorez, produced a standing ovation.54 Mikoyan, in contrast, had provided a brief foretaste of what was to come from Khrushchev in a speech on 16 February in which he spoke of people who had wrongly been declared to be ‘enemies of the people’, and said that ‘for roughly 20 years we did not really have collective leadership’.55 Mikoyan’s younger brother, Artem (co-designer of the MiG fighter aircraft, one of the two famous engineers after whom the planes were named), who was also at the congress, came up to him some time afterwards and said that many delegates were cursing him for criticizing Stalin. Why had he taken that initiative when Khrushchev had said nothing similar? Mikoyan told him to wait, for he would hear much more dreadful things about Stalin in the speech which Khrushchev would deliver in closed session.56 The other delegates, however, had no idea of what was in store for them. They were all set to return home on 25 February when they were called back for the unreported session. It was Khrushchev’s four-hour peroration then which became known as the Secret Speech. It did not remain secret for long, since it was distributed to foreign Communist leaders as well as to Communist officials in the Russian regions.
The Poles were the least careful in safeguarding its confidentiality. They authorized the printing of three thousand copies for reading in party cells, but the printers showed considerable initiative and ran off another fifteen thousand.57 By early April a copy had reached the CIA. It was not long before it was published in the West – for the first time in the United States by the New York Times and in Britain by The Observer. Khrushchev, in the view of his son, was not unhappy that the speech became known in the wider world. A copy was even leaked as early as March to a British journalist, John Rettie, who was working for the Reuters news agency in Moscow. Certainly Khrushchev was by no means averse to gaining the credit due to him for mounting the first sustained attack on Stalin by a leading Soviet politician. Domestically, moreover, other members of the party’s Presidium were still more closely associated with, and more likely to be damaged by, the crimes and errors of Stalin which he divulged. The official text, published in the West by June 1956 and in the Soviet Union not until 1989,58 did not include all of Khrushchev’s colourful asides, but it was a far sharper and more vivid onslaught on Stalin than a majority of the Presidium wished.
The individual cases Khrushchev mentioned in his speech were but a tiny fragment of the number which could have been adduced, but their impact was immense. Thus, for example, he cited the case of Robert Eikhe, who had been a Bolshevik since 1905 and who, at the time of his arrest in 1938, was a candidate member of the Politburo and the Commissar for Agriculture. Eikhe managed to send two declarations to Stalin in which he stated that his confessions were entirely false and were extracted from him under extreme duress. He wrote: ‘Not being able to suffer the tortures to which I was submitted by [NKVD interrogators] Ushakov and Nikolayev – and especially by the first one – who utilized the knowledge that my broken ribs have not properly mended and have caused me great pain, I have been forced to accuse myself and others.’59 Eikhe, as Khrushchev informed the delegates to the Twentieth Congress, retracted everything that was in his confession when he was finally brought to court in 1940. His faith in the Communist Party undimmed, he said: ‘The most important thing for me is to tell the court, the party and Stalin that I am not guilty. I have never been guilty of any conspiracy. I will die believing in the truth of party policy as I have believed in it during my whole life.’ As in all such show trials, the verdict had been predetermined. Two days later Eikhe was shot.60 The only thing untypical about this was that he had been sufficiently unbowed, and enough of a Bolshevik true believer, despite everything that had happened to him, to retract his confession in court. As already noted in Chapter 4, it was in his Twentieth Congress Secret Speech that Khrushchev informed the party delegates that close to three-quarters of the Central Committee who had been put in place at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 were arrested and shot before the end of that decade, and that well over half of the delegates to that earlier congress had also been arrested.
Khrushchev was also able to show how sedulously Stalin engaged in self-glorification while maintaining a front of modesty. In the 1948 edition of the hagiographical Short Biography of Stalin published in the Soviet Union, which, as Khrushchev noted, turned its subject into ‘an infallible sage’, Stalin made a number of emendations to the manuscript by hand. After enhancing still further his achievements, he himself inserted: ‘Although he performed his task as leader of the party and the people with consummate skill and enjoyed the unreserved support of the entire Soviet people, Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation.’61
How dangerous the report was for international Communism, especially for the regimes which had been established by Soviet force of arms in Eastern Europe, was soon to become clear. (The international repercussions of the speech are among the issues discussed in Chapter 15.) Khrushchev’s revelations came close to sweeping Communists from power in more than one country and, in their aftermath, threatened his own position. By exposing some of the crimes of Stalin, albeit very partially – with an almost exclusive emphasis on the arrests of party members on trumped-up charges, rather than on Stalin’s policies which caused immense suffering to many more non-Communists – Khrushchev pricked the bubble of infallibility with which the Communist Party had surrounded itself. That the highest echelons of the party could get things so badly wrong, that the Great Leader, admired by Communists throughout the world, could have been personally responsible for the deaths of so many of their comrades came as a profound shock to Communists and their sympathisers worldwide. In many ways, the breakthrough to a higher level of honesty in Khrushchev’s speech, however incomplete its disclosure of facts and however simplistic its analysis, was the beginning of the end of international Communism, but that end was a long time in coming.*