Stalin could not dominate by terror alone. Needing the support of the elites in the government, the party, the army and the security police, he systematically sought favour among them. The privileges and power of functionaries were confirmed and the dignity of institutions was enhanced. By keeping the gulf between the rulers and the ruled, Stalin hoped to prevent the outbreak of popular opposition. What is more, he tried to increase his specific appeal to ethnic Russians by reinforcing a form of Russian nationalism alongside Marxism-Leninism; and Stalin cultivated his image as a leader whose position at the helm of the Soviet state was vital for the country’s military security and economic development.
Such measures could delay a crisis for the regime; they were not a permanent solution. In any case Stalin did not adhere to the measures consistently. He was far too suspicious of his associates and the country’s élites to provide them with the entirely stable circumstances that would have alleviated the strains in politics, the economy and society. His health deteriorated after the Second World War. His holidays in Abkhazia became longer, and he sustained his efforts much more concentratedly in international relations than in domestic policy. But he could intervene whenever he wanted in any public deliberations. If an open debate took place on any big topic, it was because he had given permission. If a problem developed without reaction by central government and party authorities, it was either because Stalin did not think it very important or did not think it amenable to solution. He remained the dictator.
He so much avoided flamboyance that he refrained from giving a single major speech in the period between mid-April 1948 and October 1952. At first he declined the title of Generalissimus pressed upon him by Politburo colleagues. In a characteristic reference to himself in the third person, he wondered aloud: ‘Do you want comrade Stalin to assume the rank of Generalissimus? Why does comrade Stalin need this? Comrade Stalin doesn’t need this.’1
But assume it he did, and he would have been angry if the torrents of praise had dried up. His name appeared as an authority in books on everything from politics and culture to the natural sciences. The Soviet state hymn, which he had commissioned in the war, contained the line: ‘Stalin brought us up.’ In the film The Fall of Berlin he was played by an actor with luridly ginger hair and a plastic mask who received the gratitude of a multinational crowd which joyfully chanted: ‘Thank you, Stalin!’ By 1954, 706 million copies of Stalin’s works had been published.2 In 1949 a parade was held in Red Square to celebrate his seventieth birthday and his facial image was projected into the evening sky over the Kremlin. His official biography came out in a second edition, which he had had amended so as to enhance the account of his derring-do under Nicholas II. His height was exaggerated in newsreels by clever camera work. The pockmarks on his face were airbrushed away. This perfect ‘Stalin’ was everywhere while the real Stalin hid himself from view.
Among the peoples of the USSR he strained to identify himself with the ethnic Russians. In private he talked in his native tongue with those of his intimates who were Georgian; and even his deceased wife Nadezhda Allilueva had Georgian ancestors.3 He ran his supper parties like a Georgian host (although most such hosts would not have thrown tomatoes at his guests as Stalin did).4 But publicly his origins embarrassed him after a war which had intensified the self-awareness and pride of Russians; and his biography referred just once to his own father’s nationality.5 Stalin placed the Russian nation on a pedestal: ‘Among all peoples of our country it is the leading people.’6 Official favour for things Russian went beyond precedent. The lexicographers were told to remove foreign loan-words from the dictionaries. For instance, the Latin-American tango was renamed ‘the slow dance’.7 The history of nineteenth-century science was ransacked and – glory be! – it was found that practically every major invention from the bicycle to the television had been the brainchild of an ethnic Russian.
Simultaneously the Soviet authorities re-barricaded the USSR from alien influences. Polina Zhemchuzhina, Molotov’s wife, was imprisoned for greeting the Israeli emissary Golda Meir too warmly. The poet Boris Pasternak was terrified when the Russian-born British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, then serving as a diplomat in Moscow, paid him a visit at home. Stalin expressed the following opinion to Nikita Khrushchëv: ‘We should never allow a foreigner to fly across the Soviet Union.’8 After the war, Kliment Voroshilov placed a ban on the reporting of Canadian ice-hockey results.9 Great Russia always had to be the world’s champion nation. A propaganda campaign was initiated to stress that there should be no ‘bowing down’ before the achievements and potentiality of the West.
All national groups suffered, but some suffered more than others. The cultures of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians – who had only recently been re-conquered – were ravaged. The same occurred to the Romanian-speaking Moldavians; in their case even their language was emasculated: first it was equipped with a Cyrillic alphabet and then its vocabulary compulsorily acquired loan-words from Russian so as to distinguish it strongly from Romanian.10 The Ukrainian language was decreasingly taught to Ukrainian-speaking children in the RSFSR.11 More sinister still was the experience of a philologist who was imprisoned simply for stating that some Finno-Ugric languages had more declensions than Russian. Historiography became ever more imperialist. Shamil, the leader of the nineteenth-century rebellion in the North Caucasus against tsarism, was depicted unequivocally as a reactionary figure. Anyone dead or alive who since time immemorial had opposed the Russian state was prone to be denounced.12
The nationality which underwent the greatest trauma were the Jews. The Anti-Fascist Jewish Committee was closed down without explanation, and its leader and outstanding Yiddish singer Solomon Mikhoels was murdered in a car crash on Stalin’s orders. Several prominent Soviet politicians who happened to be Jewish, such as Semën Lozovski, disappeared into prison.
Stalin, starting with his article on the national question in 1913, refused to describe the Jews as a nation since, unlike the Ukrainians or Armenians, they did not inhabit a particular historic territory. In 1934 he sought to give them a territory of their own by establishing a ‘Jewish Autonomous Region’ in Birobidzhan and asking for volunteers to populate it. But Birobidzhan lay in one of the coldest regions of eastern Siberia. Little enthusiasm was invoked by the project, and after the war there was tentative talk about turning Crimea instead into a Jewish homeland. But in the 1940s Stalin’s unease about the Jews had increased to the point that he cursed his daughter Svetlana for going out with a Jewish boyfriend. Particularly annoying to him was the admiration of many Soviet Jews for the Zionist movement which had founded the state of Israel in 1948. Stalin responded by denouncing ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘rootlessness’. He ignored the fact that Marxists had traditionally opposed nationalism in favour of cosmopolitan attitudes. Restrictions were introduced on the access of Jews to university education and professional occupations. Soviet textbooks ceased to mention that Karl Marx had been Jewish.
Russian chauvinism was rampant. The first party secretary, the police chief and the governmental chairmen in other Soviet republics such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan were invariably of Russian nationality. There was similar discrimination in appointments to other important public offices. Russians were trusted because they, more than any other nation, were thought to have a stake in the retention of the USSR in its existing boundaries.
This imperialism, however, was not taken to its fullest imaginable extent. Ordinary Russians lived as meanly as Ukrainians and Kazakhs; indeed many were worse off than Georgians and other peoples with higher per capita levels of output of meat, vegetables and fruit than Russia. Furthermore, Stalin continued to limit the expression of Russian nationhood. Despite having distorted Marxism-Leninism, he also clung to several of its main tenets. He continued to hold the Russian Orthodox Church in subservience, and practising Christians were debarred from jobs of responsibility throughout the USSR. Stalin also exercised selectivity towards Russian literary classics and allowed no nostalgia about pre-revolutionary village traditions. His version of Russian national identity was so peculiar a mixture of traditions as to be virtually his own invention. The quintessence of Russia, for Stalin, was simply a catalogue of his own predilections: militarism, xenophobia, industrialism, urbanism and gigantomania.
It also embraced a commitment to science. But as usual, Stalin gave things a political twist. His spokesman Zhdanov, despite negligible training, breezily denounced relativity theory, cybernetics and quantum mechanics as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘reactionary’. Crude, ideologically-motivated interventions were made in the research institutes for the natural sciences. The relativist concepts of Einstein were an irritant to the monolithism of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. Zhdanov proclaimed the axiomatic status of absolute notions of space, time and matter; he insisted that an unshifting objective truth existed for all organic and inorganic reality.13
Persecution of scholarship was accompanied by the continued promotion of cranks. By the 1940s the pseudo-scientist Lysenko was claiming to have developed strains of wheat that could grow within the Arctic circle. His gruff manner was attractive to Stalin. The result was disaster for professional biology: any refusal to condone Lysenkoite hypotheses was punished by arrest. Where biology led, chemistry, psychology and linguistics quickly followed. Physics escaped this mauling only because the scientists employed on the Soviet nuclear weapon project convinced Beria that the USSR would not acquire an A-bomb unless they were allowed to use Einstein’s concepts. Stalin muttered to Beria: ‘Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later.’14 This grudging indulgence proved the rule. Researchers of all kinds, in the arts as well as in the sciences, were treated as technicians investigating problems strictly within the guidelines prescribed by the state authorities.
Stalin made this crystal clear when he intruded himself into erudite debates among linguisticians. In his quirky booklet of 1950, Marxism and Questions of Linguistics, he took it upon himself to insist that the Russian language originated in the provinces of Kursk and Orël.15 The entire intelligentsia was constrained to applaud the booklet as an intellectual breakthrough and to apply its wisdom to other fields of scholarship. Writers scrambled to outdo each other in praise of Stalin’s injunctions.
The arts suffered alongside the sciences and the wartime cultural semi-truce was brought to an end. Zhdanov again led the assault, describing the poet Anna Akhmatova as ‘half-nun, half-whore’. The short-story writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, who had avoided trouble by writing predominantly for children, was also castigated. Shostakovich could no longer have his symphonies performed. Zhdanov noted that several artists had withheld explicit support for the official ideology, and he announced that this ‘idea-lessness’ (bezideinost) would no longer be tolerated. Essentially he was demanding overt adherence to a single set of ideas, ‘Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism’. The various official organizations of creative artists were trundled into action. Tikhon Khrennikov, chairman of the Union of Musicians, was rivalled only by Alexander Fadeev, leader of the Union of Writers, in fawning before Zhdanov’s judgements on particular composers, painters, poets and film directors. Such cheerleaders cried that the arts should be the conveyor-belt for the regime’s commands.
Only rarely did Stalin intervene in Zhdanov’s campaign for Marxist-Leninist compliance. But when he did, his effect was terrifying. For instance, in 1947 Stalin, Zhdanov and Molotov paid a visit to the director Sergei Eisenstein, who was filming the second instalment of his two-part depiction of Ivan the Terrible. To Stalin’s mind, Eisenstein had failed to stress that Tsar Ivan’s terror against the aristocracy had been justified; he urged Eisenstein to ‘show that it was necessary to be ruthless’. The intimidated director – who already had a chronic cardiac complaint – asked for further detailed advice; but Stalin would only reply, in false self-deprecation: ‘I’m not giving you instructions but expressing the comments of a spectator.’ Eisenstein was deeply scared by the conversation. He died a few months later.16
Meanwhile only a few works that were critical of social and economic conditions were permitted. Among the most interesting were the sketches of collective-farm life published by Valentin Ovechkin under the title Rural Daily Rounds. And so Stalin, probably at Khrushchëv’s instigation, permitted a portrait of the troubles of contemporary farming to appear in Pravda. This seepage through the Stalinist cultural dam occurred solely because Politburo members themselves were in dispute about agrarian policy. For the most part, in any case, official propagandists remained utterly self-satisfied, asserting that all Soviet citizens were living in comfort. A massive cookbook was produced in 1952, The Book of Delicious and Healthy Food, which took as its epigraph a quotation from Stalin: ‘The peculiar characteristic of our revolution consists in its having given the people not only freedom but also material goods as well as the opportunity of a prosperous and cultured life.’17
The beneficiaries of the Soviet order were not the ‘people’, not the workers, kolkhozniki and office-clerks. Even doctors, engineers and teachers were poorly paid. But one group in society was certainly indebted to Stalin. This was constituted by the high and middling ranks of the bureaucracy in the ministries, the party, the armed forces and the security organs. The material assets of functionaries were small by the standards of the rich in the West. But they knew how hard life was for the rest of society; they also understood that, if they were unlucky in some way in their career, they might suddenly enter prison despite being innocent of any crime. Immediate pleasure was the priority for them.18
The tone of their lifestyle was set by Politburo members as the ballet and the opera were given the imprimatur of official approval. Stalin patronized the Bolshoi Theatre, favouring its singers with coveted awards. The families of the Politburo went to the spa-town Pyatigorsk in the North Caucasus to take the waters. Occasionally they went to Karlovy Vary in Czechoslovakia. Flats were done up with wallpaper, lamps and chairs that were unobtainable in general stores such as GUM on Red Square. Special shops, special hospitals and special holiday-homes were available to persons of political importance. The compulsory fees that had been introduced in 1940 for pupils wishing to complete their secondary schooling meant that the proportion of working-class entrants to universities fell from forty-five per cent in 1935 to just above twenty-five by 1950.19 The central and local nomenklaturas were steadily turning into a hereditary social group.
But the nomenklatura did not yet flaunt their perks which had to be enjoyed discreetly in deference to the official ultimate aim of social egalitarianism. The Politburo took care to wear modest tunics or dull suits and hats. Ordinary people were given no hint about the tables creaking under the weight of caviar, sturgeon and roast lamb served at Kremlin banquets. Stalin himself lived fairly simply by the standards of several Politburo members; but even he had a governess for his daughter, a cook and several maids, a large dacha at Kuntsevo, an endless supply of Georgian wine and so few worries about money that most of his pay-packets lay unopened at the time of his death. Armed guards secured the privacy of the apartment blocks of the central political élite. Only the domestic servants, nannies and chauffeurs knew the truth about the lifestyle of the nomenklatura.
No wonder the emergent ruling class was determined to keep the foundations of the Soviet order in good repair. The mood of most functionaries was triumphalist; they felt that the USSR’s victory in the Second World War had demonstrated the superiority of communism over capitalism. They themselves were by now better qualified than before the war; they were more literate and numerate and most of them had completed their secondary education. But this in no way diminished their ideological crudity. Far from it: they did not distinguish between the interests of the regime and their own, and they would brook no challenge to their exploitative, repressive measures.
Stalin and his subordinates still talked about the eventual realization of communism, reaffirming that ‘the state will not last forever’.20 But how to create a communist society was not a question under consideration. Far from it. The specific aspirations of the Soviet working class no longer figured prominently in Soviet propaganda. Workers in the rest of the world were called upon to engage in revolutionary struggle, but not in the USSR. At home the main requirement was for patriotism. Stalin implicitly laid down this line even in his Marxism and Questions of Linguistics. For example, he stressed the need to reject the notion that language was the product of class-based factors. This notion had conventionally been propagated by communist zealots who declared that words and grammar were the product of the social imperatives of the ruling class of a given society. Stalin instead wanted Soviet schoolchildren to admire the poetry of the nineteenth-century writer Alexander Pushkin without regard to his aristocratic background. Patriotism was to count for more than class.21
Here Stalin was clarifying the doctrines of communist conservatism prominent in his thought immediately before the Second World War. As ruler and theorist he wished to emphasize that no transformation in the Soviet order was going to happen in the foreseeable future. The attitudes, policies and practices of the post-war period were meant to endure for many more years.
Nowhere was this more obvious than in the discussions in 1950–51 among 240 leading scholars about a projected official textbook on political economy. Dauntlessly many of the 240 participants took issue with the premisses of current state policy.22 Stalin entered the debate in 1952 by producing yet another booklet, The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. He laid down that the objective ‘laws’ of economics could not be ignored by governmental planners and that there were limits on what was achievable by human will. This was a rebuff to S. G. Strumilin, who had been among his scholarly supporters at the end of the 1920s. On the other hand, Stalin offered no hope for the relaxation of economic policy. Taking issue with L. D. Yaroshenko, he argued that the primacy of capital goods in industrial planning was unalterable; and he reprimanded V. G. Venzher and A. V. Sanina for proposing the selling-off of the state-owned agricultural machinery to kolkhozes.23
Stalin made no mention of topics such as the party, the government, elections, relations between classes, participation, international communism, authority or terror. On a single great subject he was expansive: global capitalism. He began by declaring that the economies of war-beaten Germany and Japan would soon recover. This accurate prediction was accompanied by a prognosis which has proved awry: namely that after communism’s victory in China, the market for global capitalism would be too limited for capitalist countries to be able to expand their economies. According to Stalin, the result would be yet another world war among the major non-communist powers, and he reaffirmed Lenin’s thesis on the inevitable recurrence of such wars so long as capitalist imperialism endured. Stalin repeated that the most acute danger of a Third World War occurring lay in rivalry between one capitalist coalition and another and not between communism and capitalism.24
His plan was to go on and compose a broader work; but it is unlikely that he would have tugged such a work out of the rut worn by his previous writings. Stalin had accommodated his thought to the kind of Soviet state that already existed. He ruled over this state, but needed also to rule through it.
And so relations among the various public bodies by the late 1940s were entering a stable period by the measure of the past two decades. In order to indicate that revolutionary disturbance would not recur in the institutional framework, Stalin in 1946 renamed the People’s Commissariats as Ministries. He also ordered that the Red Army should henceforward be called the Soviet Army. This emphasis on continuity with the pre-revolutionary state was reinforced artistically. In 1948 the octocentenary of Moscow’s foundation was celebrated, and a statue of the medieval patriot Prince Dolgoruki was commissioned for erection on Gorki Street. Dolgoruki’s stern visage and muscular limbs gave monumental expression to Stalin’s vision of Soviet statehood.25 Architects abetted the process. The power and dignity of the USSR acquired visible form in the vast granite buildings, topped by fairy-castle decorations. Six of them were constructed in central Moscow. A seventh was added in Warsaw, as if to emphasize Poland’s inclusion in the Soviet imperial domain.
And yet Stalin could not afford to allow institutional stabilization to be carried too far. As he well understood, his despotism required him periodically to re-agitate the elements in the Soviet order. In the post-war years there remained much to worry him. Those vertical clienteles and horizontal local groups were an object of continuing concern. So, too, was the fact that each of the great organizations of state was developing its own corporate identity. Soviet Army officers, like their predecessors in the tsarist forces, had begun to see themselves almost as a separate caste. The same phenomenon – albeit to a lesser degree – was visible in the economic ministries, the security police and the party.
Furthermore, the indoctrination of administrative, professional and intellectual functionaries was far from satisfactorily achieved. Some of them had ideas which sat uncomfortably alongside Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism and which came from a variety of sources. People were influenced by folk customs and by stories and memories recounted within families. Military veterans had had a glimpse of a different way of life abroad – and their conclusions were often to the USSR’s discredit. Many others continued to be motivated by national and religious traditions. Even officially-approved publications could give rise to un-Stalinist thoughts. Scientific textbooks propounded rules of investigation and validation at variance with Stalin’s claim that Marxism was based on premisses of eternal verity. Despite the heavy censorship exercised by Glavlit, moreover, citizens could glean unorthodox ideas from the approved Russian literary classics: Pushkin’s poems and Tolstoy’s novels teemed with discussions about religion, philosophy, nationhood and – last but not least – politics.
How well Stalin was acquainted with this information is unknown; but certainly he acted to rearrange the pattern of Soviet politics. His despotic will was undiminished. When his personal physician V. N. Vinogradov advised him to run down his official duties on grounds of failing health, Stalin had him arrested. Stalin did not want others to know that he was no longer up to the job. He also turned against the chief of his bodyguards N. S. Vlasik and his personal assistant A. N. Poskrëbyshev. His isolation increased. He rarely saw his beloved daughter Svetlana and had not remarried since his second wife’s death in 1932. Stalin trusted nobody.
As his suspicions grew, so too did his anti-Semitic tendencies. Several other Kremlin physicians were arrested in 1952 after being denounced by a certain Lidya Timashuk. Most of the thirteen detainees in this Doctors’ Plot had Jewish names and the tirades in the press against the ‘assassins in white coats’ produced an anti-Semitic hysteria. Individual Jews were subjected to verbal abuse by their neighbours throughout the country. It made no difference that many of them no longer practised their religion: the fact that their passports recorded them as Jewish made it easy for their persecutors to identify them. Meanwhile Stalin was giving confidential consideration to a scheme to round up all Jews and force them to live in the Jewish Autonomous Region established in eastern Siberia. Polina Zhemchuzhina, Molotov’s Jewish wife, was brought back from a camp and re-interrogated. The prospects for Soviet Jewry grew very bleak.
Nevertheless Jews were not Stalin’s sole intended victims. The treatment of Zhemchuzhina raised the question how long it might be before Politburo member Molotov, too, would share her fate. Stalin also appeared to be planning to move against past and present leaders of the Soviet security organs. Beria was a notable potential target. In 1951, arrests had begun of party and governmental officials of Mingrelian origin. Mingrelians are an ethnic division of the Georgian nation, and the fact that Beria was their most famous son was not coincidental. A bloody purge of some kind was in the offing even though its exact nature and scale remained unclear. Almost certainly something broader than the Leningrad purge of 1949 was in Stalin’s mind. The shadow cast over Molotov and Beria might well eventually reach many other persons at the apex of the Soviet state. It cannot be excluded that his ultimate purpose was to conduct yet another great bloody purge of personnel in government, party, army and police.
Probably his exact purposes will never be discovered. Certainly he did not confide them to the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952. The biggest event was the change of name from the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Stalin left it to Malenkov to give the Central Committee report; and the contributions not only by Malenkov but also by everyone else emphasized that Stalin’s wise leadership had their unanimous approval and gratitude. Apparently not the slightest disagreement on policy existed in the Kremlin.
Yet while offering obeisance to the officially-tabled resolutions, Stalin’s associates used indirect language to indicate their respective differences of opinion. Malenkov wanted greater attention to be paid to light-industrial investment and to the development of intensive methods of agriculture. Beria highlighted the desirability of treating the non-Russians more carefully. After propounding his agricultural schemes, Khrushchëv declared that every party member should display ‘vigilance’: a conventional code-word for support of political repression. A careful reader of the Pravda reports could therefore discern that tensions existed at the apex of the Soviet communist party. Stalin made no attempt to arbitrate among them. Most of the delegates anyway did not care: they had come to the Congress mainly to catch a glimpse of Stalin and to pass the resolutions with unanimity. At the very mention of Stalin’s name they applauded, and several times in the course of the Congress they gave him standing ovations.
Only at the Central Committee elected by the Congress did Stalin at last reveal his impatience. Firstly he asked to resign as Central Committee Secretary. Malenkov was chairing the session and turned white with dread lest the Central Committee members failed spontaneously to rise to their feet to deny Stalin his request. Luckily for him, they did.26
Then Stalin gave an impromptu address. Still speaking of his weariness, he gave the impression that he knew this might be the last speech he made. In particular, he rambled through his memories of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918: ‘And what about Lenin? Just you read again what he said and what he wrote at that time. He let out a roar at that time, in so incredibly grievous a situation; he thundered, he was scared of no one. Thundered, he did.’ In almost the same breath Stalin considered his own career. While almost begging the Central Committee to compare him favourably with Lenin, he also wanted to appear as the party’s modest and dutiful leader. ‘Once this task has been entrusted to me,’ he declared, ‘I carry it through. But not in such a way that it’s accredited only to me. I’ve not been brought up that way.’27
This was a man anticipating his obituary. Stalin, too, wanted to be remembered as a leader of courage and foresight, a leader who thundered. These were not the characteristics which immediately sprang to mind among those who knew him at close quarters: he had not been notably brave, foresightful or devoid in vanity.
Weary or not, Stalin continued to pose a deadly threat to his colleagues. Halfway through his Central Committee address he suddenly accused Molotov and Mikoyan of political cowardice.28 They rejected his criticisms as tactfully as they could in the circumstances, and the topic was dropped. Nevertheless Central Committee members had been shocked by the episode. Many of them concluded that Stalin wanted at the very least to prevent these two veteran leaders from succeeding him. This impression was strengthened by other moves he made at the Central Committee plenum. For example, he redesignated the Politburo as a Presidium and increased the number of its members to twenty-five. The sinister aspect of the change was that Stalin simultaneously secured the appointment of a seven-person Bureau of the Presidium which, by involving mainly the younger leaders, would allow him to drop the veterans at a convenient moment in the future.
Several central politicians already had reason to expect to be arrested before he collapsed in his dacha at Kuntsevo on 1 March 1953. The sudden, secret nature of his indisposition gave rise to rumours that someone, perhaps Beria, had ordered some skulduggery. Certainly Beria and fellow Politburo members took an unconscionably long time to make a serious attempt to resuscitate Stalin over the next few days.29 The kindest interpretation is that they were too afraid to intervene in decisions on his medical care. Finding him on the floor of his bedroom, they dithered as to what to do with his body; and after doctors pronounced him definitely dead on 5 March, there was much weeping over his passing. Their Boss had entranced as well as horrified them.
Their grief was shared in homes and on the streets after the radio announcement was made on 6 March. Stalin’s funeral took place on Red Square three days later. Foreign statesmen attended as Molotov, Malenkov and Beria pronounced eulogies to the deceased dictator. Molotov, despite having a wife held in prison on Stalin’s orders, was visibly distraught. Malenkov was better composed. But Beria in private dropped all pretence of respect for Stalin and cursed his memory. After the speeches, Stalin’s corpse, embalmed by experts from the same institute as had developed the technique for Lenin, was displayed in what was renamed as the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum. A silence was meant to descend over Moscow. But such was the crowd in the nearby streets that a commotion broke out. The pressure of bodies led to dozens of fatalities. From under the glass the chemically-treated corpse could still terminate innocent lives.
And so Stalin’s accomplices came into a disturbing inheritance. It is true that the Soviet Union was still a superpower. It dominated Eastern Europe. It had the world’s second largest industrial capacity; its population was literate and acquiescent. The armed forces, the security organs, the party and the ministries of government were calmly able to confront their duties. If Soviet leaders were going to face trouble in 1953, it would arise only because they had grossly mishandled opinion among the élites or fallen out irretrievably among themselves – and the leaders could at least take consolation from the fact that Stalin’s death had pre-empted the immediate possibility of a massive purge that would lead to the deaths of leaders, their cliental groups and perhaps millions of other people.
Yet enormous problems had been bequeathed by him, and not the least of them was agricultural. Malenkov had asserted at the Nineteenth Party Congress that wheat production had recovered to the level of 1940 and that the country’s grain problem had been solved ‘definitively and forever’. This was nonsense. The statistics were a wild exaggeration of reality since they were based upon what was known as the ‘biological yield’. This was a calculation derived from observations of the crop before it was harvested. Subsequent loss of grain in fact often occurred through bad weather; and it always took place because the harvest was stored so badly. Furthermore, whole regions of Russia had fallen out of cultivation. The kolkhozniki were under-paid and over-taxed, and the demographic structure of countless villages was distorted by the exodus of most able-bodied men and the young of both sexes. The neglect of rural problems could not be allowed to persist.
Even the forced-labour system presented difficulty. Discontent was on the rise in the prisons, camps, colonies and ‘special settlements’ where 5.5 million prisoners were still held.30 A rebellion in Kolyma in 1949 was followed by another near Krasnoyarsk in 1951 and yet others in Labytnangi and Ozerlag in 1952.31 Permanent quiescence in the Gulag could no longer be taken for granted.
At the same time it was questionable whether the ‘free’ industrial sector could continue as previously. Workers were too afraid to go on strike, but resented their conditions of labour, their low wages and poor diet and housing. There was little that administrators could do to make them more conscientious; and the administrators themselves were constrained by patterns of organization inimical to honesty and independent thought. Wasteful methods of production persisted in factories, mines and other enterprises. Stalin, furthermore, had rejected advice to invest substantially in chemical industries or in natural gas. His projections had become extremely inflexible. Capital goods in general and armaments in particular were given reinforced priority: expenditure on the armed forces, their weaponry and equipment, was forty-five per cent more in 1952 than two years earlier. This was a great strain upon the Soviet budget and was not indefinitely sustainable.
National problems, too, had accumulated. Acute, lasting embitterment had been caused by Stalin’s deportations of nationalities during and after the Second World War; and the elevation of the prestige of the Russians above the other peoples of the USSR also caused lasting offence. Science and culture, too, were subjected to excessive supervision. Not only writers and scientists but also teachers, engineers, lawyers and managers worked in fear. Initiative from below was thwarted. The disgruntlement among administrative, professional and intellectual groups was intensifying. They especially wanted to work without fear of imprisonment. Only terror at the punitive repercussions held them back from complaining publicly.
All in all, Stalin’s system of rule was not at its most effective when dealing with an increasingly complex society. The government, the party, the army and the security police – at metropolitan as well as local levels – were run on principles of the most rigid hierarchy. The scope for constructive consultation and collaboration had been severely reduced. The Soviet state as a whole was vastly over-centralized. Policies were decided by a tiny group of leaders, and the danger that they might blunder was acute. The leadership itself was subject to permanent intimidation; none of its members could fail to be mindful of the power of the security organs. For years the various Politburo members had taken objection to official policies but never dared to express themselves openly. Stalin had scared them rigid. In short, there was too much fear and too little trust for such a system to endure indefinitely.
The world outside was also dangerous. East European nations resented their subjugation to the Soviet Union. The USA and its allies in NATO had no intention of rescuing them from this position; but resistance to further communist expansion was a firm objective. The Korean War was a suppurating sore in relations between the USSR and the USA.
These were among the problems left behind by Stalin. They existed in every area of public life: politics, economy, ethnic relations, culture, security and continental and global power. And they complicated and aggravated each other. It is true that the Soviet order was not on the verge of collapse. But if several of these problems were not tackled within the next few years, a fundamental crisis would occur. Stalin’s legatees were justified in feeling nervous, and knew that the next few months would be a period of great trial for them. The uncontainable surge of crowds on to the streets of Red Square as he was laid to rest alongside Lenin in the joint Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum had been a warning to his successors about the passions lurking under society’s calm surface. This was the first act of self-assertion by the people since the inception of Stalin’s dictatorship. It was by no means clear how the Kremlin leaders would respond to the challenge.