Then there were those who had objections of an even more immediate nature: the kulaks, priests and national leaders repressed during the 1930s; the Gulag inmates; the deported nationalities of the Second World War; the peoples of the annexed Baltic states, western Ukraine and Moldavia; the Red Army soldiers captured as prisoners-of-war by the Germans. Countless millions of Soviet citizens would have been delighted by the collapse of Stalin’s party and government.
There was also a widespread sentiment that the wartime rigours applied by the Soviet political leadership for the defeat of Hitler should be removed. Otherwise the war would not have been worth fighting. This sense was strong among men and women who had become adults in 1941–5; for they, unlike their parents, had no direct experience of the purges of 1937–8. They felt fear, but it was not always the petrifying fear common to their parents.8 There was also less tension than in earlier times between the working-class and the intelligentsia. In particular, the soldiers on campaign had shared appalling conditions regardless of social origin, and they wanted policies to be changed not just for a section of society but for everyone. Courageous individual spirits had been produced by the war. It is no accident that some of the most durable critics of the ascendant party leadership in the 1960s and 1970s, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Roy Medvedev, had been young veterans in the war.9
At the USSR Supreme Soviet elections in 1946, people privately complained that there was no point in voting since there was only a single candidate for each seat and the electoral results would not affect decisions of policy. In the countryside rumours spread like wildfire that the kolkhozes were about to be disbanded,10 and peasant households went on appropriating land from the farms and growing produce for personal consumption and black-market trade.11 There was disgruntlement with the abject remuneration for farm-work. The same mutterings were heard in the towns, especially after the raising of food-ration prices in 1946.12
Stalin ordered his intimates ‘to deliver a strong blow’ against any talk about ‘democracy’, talk which he thought to be the unfortunate result of the USSR’s wartime alliance.13 He was striking before opposition got out of hand. No unifying political vision existed among the peasants; factory workers, low-ranking administrators, teachers and other professional people were equally vague about what needed to be done. It is true that bands of guerrillas challenged Soviet rule in the newly-annexed regions of the USSR – in western Ukraine they held out until the mid-1950s. But such resistance was rare in the older parts of the USSR. In Russia it was virtually non-existent, and only a very few clandestine dissentient groups were formed. These consisted mainly of students, who were quickly arrested. In any case, such students were committed to a purer version of Leninism than Stalin espoused: the communist dictatorship had lasted so long that young rebels framed their ideas in Marxist-Leninist categories. Lenin, the planner of dictatorship and terror, was misunderstood by such students as a libertarian. The groups anyway failed to move beyond a preliminary discussion of their ideas before being caught and arrested by the security police.
Most other citizens who detested Stalin were grumblers rather than insurrectionaries. Police phone-tappers recorded the following conversation between General Rybalchenko and General Gordov:
Rybalchenko: So this is the life that has begun: you just lie down and die! Pray God that there won’t be another poor harvest.
Gordov: But where will the harvest come from? You need to sow something for that!
Rybalchenko: The winter wheat has been a failure, of course. And yet Stalin has travelled by train. Surely he must have looked out of the window? Absolutely everyone says openly how everyone is discontented with life. On the trains, in fact everywhere, it’s what everyone’s saying.14
This loose talk led to their arrest. But no matter how many persons were caught in this way, the resentment against the regime persisted. A local party secretary, P. M. Yemelyanov, gave this confidential warning: ‘There are going to be revolts and uprisings, and the workers will say: “What were we fighting for?” ’15 Even Stalin seemed to feel the need to choose his words with circumspection. In a speech on 24 May 1945 he acknowledged that society had had every right in mid-1941 ‘to say to the Government: you have not justified our expectations; get out of here altogether and we shall install another government which will conclude a peace with Germany’.16
This was a long way from being a fulsome confession. On the contrary, he was inculpating the Soviet government as if he himself had not led that government. Nor did he relent in his practical campaigns of mass repression. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, western Ukraine were subjected to a resumed quota of deportations. Those persons who had collaborated with the German occupying forces were imprisoned, and the Soviet security forces hunted down ‘bandits’ and ‘kulaks’.17 The arrests were not confined to overt opponents. Prominent among the victims were also persons guilty of no other crime than the fact that they belonged to the political, economic and cultural élites of the local nationality. According to the police files, 142,000 citizens of the three formerly independent Baltic states were deported in 1945–9. Most of the deportees were dispatched to ‘special settlements’ in the Russian far north, Siberia and Kazakhstan.18
This meant that Russians, too, came to learn of Stalin’s continued application of terror even though the violence was at its most intense outside the RSFSR in the USSR’s ‘borderlands’. Many gained such knowledge still more directly if they happened to have had relatives taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht. Vlasov, the Russian Liberation Army leader, fell into Soviet captivity and was hanged. His soldiers were either shot or sent to labour camps, usually for terms of between fifteen and twenty-five years.19 But Stalin did not restrict himself to military renegades. The infamous Order No. 270 that defined as a traitor anyone taken captive by the Germans had not been repealed. Emaciated by their suffering in Hitler’s concentration camps, 2,775,700 former Red Army soldiers were taken into Soviet custody upon their repatriation. After being interrogated by the Department of Verification-Filtration Camps, about half of them were transferred into the Gulag system.20
The usual pressure to guarantee a supply of inmates to the forced-labour camps had been intensified by Stalin’s predictable decision to catch up with the Americans and British in nuclear-bomb capacity.21 He had put Beria in charge of the bomb research project, commanding him to build testing-sites, to assemble scientists (including captured Germans), to collect American secrets by means of the Soviet spy network, to discover and mine the necessary natural resources. Hundreds of thousands of Gulag prisoners were deployed in the secret quest for uranium.22
The technology of war had changed, and Stalin was frantic about wanting the USSR to stay abreast of the transformation. Yet even Stalin perceived that several large political and economic questions did not offer easy answers. Debate was allowed in his inner circle of leaders about the difficulties; academics and journalists were also allowed, within prescribed limits, to offer their opinions to the leadership in books, journals and newspapers. Such deliberations, especially in 1945–7, were lively enough to strengthen the hope among some of the participants that Stalin might be contemplating a permanent softening of his political style. These were, as the last tsar had said in 1895 about projects for reform, ‘senseless dreams’. The one-party, one-ideology state; the retention of the people of the USSR and Eastern Europe under Soviet imperial control; the Stalinist personal dictatorship: these basic features of the compound of the Soviet order as modified in the course of Stalin’s rule were held firmly beyond the scope of permissible discussion.
Yet some questions of immense importance had to be kept under collective review: even Stalin did not trust himself to anticipate everything. In foreign policy, he felt nervous about the USA’s ambitions. Potential flashpoints in Soviet-American relations existed not only in Japan, China and Iran but also in Europe. The Soviet leadership had to decide whether to support revolutionary movements in France, Italy and Greece. Je
nö Varga, Director of the Institute of the World Economy and World Politics, urged caution and argued that a parliamentary road to communism was in any case a realistic possibility in Western Europe. By contrast, Politburo member Zhdanov argued that revolutionary movements should be encouraged wherever they might arise – and he warmed to the Yugoslav communist leaders who criticized the slowness of the political and economic changes being imposed by communist parties elsewhere in Eastern Europe.23
Issues at home were equally vexatious. The problems of state organization that had arisen in the 1930s remained unresolved. The party’s role was yet again controversial and this time the protagonists were Zhdanov and Malenkov. Zhdanov wished to restore the party’s role in selecting governmental cadres and in mobilizing society whereas Malenkov opposed an increase in the party’s authority and wished to keep the party organized along the lines of branches of the economy.24 Their dispute was only in part a competition to become Stalin’s prime adjutant. It was also the result of the inherent structural tensions within the one-party state.
This was not the only dissension in the Soviet political leadership. On industry, there was severe disagreement about regional policy. At first it was the Politburo’s policy to accelerate the development of Siberia and central Asia; but Molotov and Voznesenski apparently preferred to concentrate resources in the traditional European manufacturing regions where the costs of production were smaller and where the population was greater. And while the priority for capital-goods production was fixed, the precise proportion of expenditure to be left for the requirements of civilian consumers was contentious. Mikoyan advocated the boosting of light-industrial production. On agriculture, Khrushchëv felt the collective farms were too small and called for amalgamations that would lead to the establishment of ‘agrotowns’. Andreev argued the opposite, proposing the division of each farm’s work-force into several groups (or ‘links’) that would take responsibility for particular tasks.25
The agenda for deliberations at the highest level was therefore long and urgent. Its items included the following: the military and diplomatic competition with the USA; the security of Soviet frontiers; Eastern Europe; the communist movement in Western Europe; industrial planning and investment; agricultural organization; the scope of national and cultural self-expression. Decision-making was complicated because the various items intersected with each other. And this was not a static situation: the post-war world was in rapid flux.
Soviet politicians operated in an environment that was exceedingly unsettling. Molotov, Zhdanov, Malenkov, Khrushchëv, Voznesenski and Beria had to compete for Stalin’s approval. After the war it was Zhdanov who was his favourite. Zhdanov returned to the Central Committee Secretariat in Moscow in 1946. He brought with him the prestige of a leader who had spent time in Leningrad while it was under siege by the Germans. Malenkov’s career went into eclipse. But Zhdanov, sodden with drink, died in August 1948. An alliance was formed between Malenkov and Beria. Together they plotted the demise of Zhdanov’s protégés. Practically the entire Leningrad and Gorki party leadership was executed in 1949. Even Politburo member and native Leningrader Voznesenski, who had argued against some of Zhdanov’s proposals, was incarcerated. Voznesenski was shot in 1950. Civilian political struggle was resuming its bloody pre-war characteristics.
Zhdanov’s scheme for a resurgent communist party was abandoned and the authority of the economic agencies of the government was confirmed. The USSR was still a one-party state; but the party as such did not rule it. The Politburo rarely met. No Party Congress was held after the war until 1952. The party was pushed back into the role proposed for it by Kaganovich in the mid-1930s: it was meant to supervise the implementation of policy, not to initiate it and certainly not to interfere in the detailed operation of governmental bodies. The infrequency of meetings of the party’s supreme bodies – the Congress, the Central Committee and the Politburo – meant that Stalin no longer accorded great significance to its tasks of supervision.
In any case, Zhdanov had not challenged the priority of the capital-goods sector, which in 1945–50 amounted to eighty-eight per cent of all industrial investment.26 The Fourth Five-Year Plan’s first draft, which had taken consumers’ aspirations into more favourable consideration than at any time since the NEP, was ripped up.27 Capital goods output, including armaments, rose by eighty-three per cent in the half-decade after the Second World War.28 This towering priority was enhanced in subsequent years. The budget of 1952 provided for a forty-five per cent increase of output for the armed forces in comparison with two years before.29 Meanwhile the Soviet team of nuclear scientists led by Sergei Kurchatov and controlled by Beria had exploded an A-bomb at the Semipalatinsk testing-site in Kazakhstan in August 1949. Beria was so relieved at the sight of the billowing mushroom cloud that he momentarily abandoned his haughtiness and gave Kurchatov a hug.30
The priority for the armed forces meant that factory production for the ordinary consumer was starved of investment. Although output in this sector was doubled in the course of the Fourth Five-Year Plan, this was an increase from the pitifully low level of wartime.31 Machine-tools, guns and bombs took precedence over shoes, coats, chairs and toys. The supply of food was also terribly inadequate. The grain harvest reaching the barns and warehouses in 1952 was still only seventy-seven per cent of the 1940 harvest.32
Schemes were introduced to raise additional revenues. Stalin sucked back citizens’ personal savings into the state’s coffers on 16 December 1947 by announcing a nine tenths devaluation of the ruble. Extra taxes, too, were invented. Among them was a charge on the peasant household for each fruit tree in its kitchen garden. Owners of cattle, pigs, sheep and hens were also subjected to punitive taxation. In 1954, fully a year after Stalin’s death, the monthly pay for a typical kolkhoznik remained lower than a sixth of the earnings of the average factory worker: a miserable sixteen rubles.33 To be sure, many kolkhozniks found other means of income; and some urban inhabitants were able to eke out their miserable wages by means of land allotments on which they grew potatoes and even kept the odd chicken. But conditions were generally abysmal. There was famine in Ukraine and Moldavia, a famine so grievous that cases of cannibalism occurred.
Many rural families elsewhere were left with so little grain after delivering their quotas to the government that they themselves had to buy flour in the towns. Innumerable farms in any case failed to comply with the state’s procurement plan. Agriculture recovery had hardly begun. This meant that it was not unusual for kolkhozniks to receive no payment whatsoever from one year’s end to the next. Such individuals would have no money to buy things from shops.
In the towns, too, there was great hardship. Stalin’s ministers planned a programme of apartment construction (for which his successors took exclusive credit) but little was achieved in the early post-war years. The Soviet welfare state was not universal: social misfits and mentally-unstable individuals were neglected; and pensions were set at a derisory level. Furthermore, they were claimable by only a million people as late as 1950. Certain occupations in the towns offered just twenty rubles monthly, considerably below the poverty level as defined by the United Nations. Admittedly these were the worst-paid jobs. But official statistics also indicated that the average urban wage in 1952 was still no higher than it had been in 1928. Pressure therefore existed not only to get a job but also to seek promotion to higher posts.34
And a similar economic system was simultaneously being imposed on many other countries by the Soviet armed forces and security police and Eastern Europe’s fraternal communist parties. The decisions of Allied political leaders at Moscow and Yalta in 1945 divided the European continent into broad zones of military responsibility; there had also been an assumption that the respective basic interests of the USSR, the USA, the UK and France would be safe-guarded after the last shot of the Second World War had been fired.
The Yugoslav communist fighter Milovan Djilas has given a record of Stalin’s musings: ‘This war is no
t as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system on it. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.’35 Initially Stalin had to act stealthily since until August 1949 the USSR, unlike the USA, had no A-bomb at its disposal. Initially he therefore geared his diplomacy to protecting his gains in Eastern Europe, where his forces had occupied Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary and eastern Germany in 1944–5. Among his goals was the arrangement of communist parties’ entrance to government in these countries. Having conquered an outer empire, he intended to reinforce his sway over it; and many Soviet citizens, however much they distrusted him, were proud that the USSR had defeated mighty Germany and had to all intents and purposes acquired a dominion stretching across half the continent. Russians in particular had a pride in this military achievement and imperial consolidation lasted through to and beyond the last years of the USSR’s existence.
Still needing to avoid trouble with the Western Allies, he imposed restraints upon the Italian, French and Greek communist parties in the West. These parties had played the largest role in the resistance to Nazism in their countries, and several communist leaders assumed that military victory would be followed by political revolution. Palmiro Togliatti consulted with Stalin before returning to Italy after the war,36 and Maurice Thorez anyway accepted anything laid down in the Kremlin for France. In Greece, the communists ignored Stalin’s cautionary instructions and tried to seize power. They paid dearly for their insubordination. Stalin ostentatiously stood aside while the USA and the UK aided the Greek monarchist forces in their defeat of communist guerrillas.
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 36