Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  The Kremlin’s other inmates were no less brutal than Stalin; they would no longer have had their posts if they had not proved themselves by his amoral standards. Yet their knowledge of conditions in the USSR made several of them doubt the desirability of pre-war policies. Stalin eventually witnessed how bad things were. In summer 1946 he went by car to the Black Sea. His caravan of vehicles made slow progress. The roads were in a terrible state and Stalin and his guests, together with hundreds of guards, stopped over in many towns. He was greeted by local communist leaders who fell over themselves to show their prowess in regenerating the country after the destruction of 1941–5. In Ukraine, where the shortage of grain was already turning into famine, Stalin was served exquisitely prepared food. Each evening his table groaned with meat, fish, vegetables and fruit. But the attempts at camouflage did not work. With his own eyes he could see at the roadsides that people were still living in holes in the ground and that wartime debris lay everywhere — and this, according to his housekeeper Valentina Istomina, made Stalin nervous.9 If he had travelled in his railway carriage FD 3878, he would have missed seeing this.

  He got over such concerns. He was not going to alter policies merely because most citizens, after a gruelling war, were hungry and destitute. He was confident that he could continue to impose a state budget that minimised attention to popular well-being. Politburo members soon understood this. If they wanted to influence the programme of party and government, they had to be wary about how they presented their ideas to the Leader — and sometimes they overestimated his level of tolerance. Several ideas were put into public discussion after 1945. Politburo members had to do this with caution if they were to survive not just politically but also in a physical sense. But they were also useless to Stalin if they failed to offer a strategic view on the USSR’s difficulties. He demanded this of his subordinates; they were not allowed merely to administer existing policies. Stalin had a talent for getting them to reveal what was in their minds. This was not very difficult since he had the power of life and death over them. At the same time they knew this and yet had to pretend to him and to themselves that they did not. While Stalin remained alive, they had to play the game according to his rules.

  Several of them — Beria, Malenkov and Khrushchëv — later showed an understanding that the degree of the regime’s repressiveness was counter-productive. There was an economic aspect to this. When the annual accounts were drawn up, it became crystal-clear that the Gulag forced-labour system cost the state more than it earned in revenues; and monetary incentives began to be introduced to raise productivity in the camps.10 This was hardly surprising. The wretches who worked with inadequate food and medical care in Siberia and northern Russia did not operate with the efficiency of free men and women. In order to hold them captive, moreover, a vast legion of administrators, guards, railwaymen and secretaries was required. This system of unofficial slavery was not the most cost-effective way to obtain timber, gold and uranium. But nobody could afford to say this directly to the Leader for fear of joining the slave-gangs. But the truth of the Gulag was known in the supreme ruling group.

  Other parts of Stalin’s programme also gnawed at the minds of several Politburo members. Malenkov was later to espouse the cause of light industry; he especially advocated the need to increase industry’s commitment to the production of consumer goods. Beria was subsequently concerned that official policy continued to offend those who did not belong to the Russian nation; he also objected to the extreme controls over cultural self-expression. Khrushchëv, with his sense of the rudimentary requirements of most citizens, felt that agrarian reform was vital. About foreign policy it was even more dangerous to express an opinion; and after the initial debate about the chances of the world communist movement Stalin clamped down: it remained for leading Soviet politicians on Stalin’s death — again it was Beria and Malenkov — to insist that a Third World War would be a disaster for the human race. Beneath the surface of official politics there was appreciation that something had to change. Several Politburo members understood that the rigidities of Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism after the war provided no permanent solution. Things had to change not only for the good of the members of the Politburo but also in order to conserve the power and prestige of the USSR.

  While Stalin lived, however, his policies were unchallengeable. He was not completely inflexible and some wartime ‘compromises’ remained in place. He did not abandon the wartime understanding with the Russian Orthodox Church. Those churches which had been reopened in the war continued to function, and the Patriarch agreed to act as unofficial ambassador for the ‘peace policy’ of the Soviet government — and the Russian Orthodox Church avidly occupied buildings which had previously belonged to other Christian denominations.

  Stalin also persisted with the ideological favour shown to the Russians in wartime. This was obvious in historical textbooks. Before 1941 it was still acceptable to show respect for those who resisted the expansion of the Russian Empire. Shamil, the Moslem cleric who fought the armies of Nicholas I and Alexander II in Dagestan and Chechnya, was given his due as an anti-tsarist hero. After the Second World War his reputation was consistently blackened. Indeed each and every figure in the pre-revolutionary past who had failed to welcome the armies of the tsars was condemned as reactionary. Russia had allegedly brought culture, enlightenment and order to its borderlands. The treatment of Shamil was a litmus test of the development of policy on the national question. So too was the visual symbolism of the urban landscape. For the octocentenary celebration of Moscow’s foundation in September 1947, Stalin commissioned a statue of Prince Yuri Dolgoruki for erection on Gorki Street. Its chain-mailed muscularity was designed to induce awe at the greatness of medieval Muscovy.11 Stalin’s toast to the Russian nation on 24 May 1945 had been no fleeting fancy.

  Even the limits of cultural expression were as wide as they had been in the war. In the arts and scholarship the situation remained marginally freer than before the Great Patriotic War. The composer Shostakovich and the poet Akhmatova still wrote pieces for public performance. Scholars, too, went on benefiting from a working environment which was less stringent than before the war.

  The level of material provision for Soviet citizens continued to exercise the minds of Stalin and his government; they remained cognisant of the high level of expectations among the peoples of the USSR once the war had been won. Initially Stalin did not plan for an economy of shortage. Although he imposed heavy control over politics, he still aimed to expand the supply of food and industrial products through the retail trade. Several governmental decrees confirmed this purpose in 1946–8.12 There was much talk about stimulating the production and distribution of consumer goods, and it was recognised that some reorganisation of commercial structures would be needed.13 For this to happen there also had to be an end to wartime inflation. In December 1947 party and government abruptly announced a devaluation of the ruble. The savings of citizens were automatically reduced to a tenth of what they had been. A decree was passed in the same month to terminate the ration-book system: Soviet citizens had to buy what they could with the rubles in their pocket or under their mattress.14

  The USSR was not the only state to take drastic action for post-war economic regeneration. Yet few governments behaved with so little regard for the difficulties posed for consumers. Announcements were made suddenly and without warning. Stalin had always ruled that way. He expected ‘the people’ to accept docilely what he demanded. Although he irritated millions of citizens by devaluing the currency, he scarcely induced their ruination: the reason they had had so much money was that they could not find the goods to spend it on. His own savings were depreciated by the devaluation decree; but he had never been a materialistic man. Unopened pay-packets were found at his Blizhnyaya dacha when he died. What mattered to Stalin was not wealth but power. In any case he and his close subordinates were protected by the network of special shops from any untoward financial effects. Stalin had for a long t
ime intimidated those reporting to him into playing down news of hardship. It was in 1947 that a terrible famine occurred across Ukraine. Khrushchëv had to deal with it as party boss in Kiev. While appealing to the Kremlin for assistance, he was careful lest Stalin should conclude that he had gone soft. Stalin therefore did not hear how bad the situation was.15

  Yet even Khrushchëv’s cautious words got him into trouble: ‘Stalin sent me the rudest, most insulting telegram which said I was a suspect person: I was writing memoranda to try and show that Ukraine could not fulfil its state procurement [quotas], and I was requesting an outrageous amount of ration-cards to feed people.’16 Stalin was not responsible for the drought that had ruined the 1946 harvest. But he remained the founder and director of the collective-farm system and his ferocious rejection of the request for aid to Ukraine makes him culpable for the deaths of millions of people in the famine of the late 1940s. Cases of cannibalism occurred. The experience seared itself into Khrushchëv’s consciousness. He had come to understand the idiotic brutality of the Soviet economic order. Stalin was incapable of such a reaction. Like Lenin, he hated any sign of what he regarded as sentimentality; and both Lenin and Stalin tended in the first instance to assume that any reports of rural hardship were the product of peasants tricking urban authorities into indulging them.17

  Not that Stalin and his central subordinates controlled everything. They concentrated on restoring authority over those sectors of state and society where authority had prevailed before 1941. Sometimes, but not always, this involved a shift in the content of policy. Yet this hardly makes it sensible to call this a period of ‘high Stalinism’ even though several Western scholars have liked to claim that the post-war years were unique. In fact Stalin’s actions were mostly reactionary: he was reverting the Soviet order to the template he had more or less imposed before Operation Barbarossa. Yet society in Russia and its borderlands had never been completely regulated by the Kremlin. The old amalgam of regimentation and chaos persisted. Several groups in society were more overt in asserting their wishes than before the war. Most obvious, of course, were the partisans in the newly annexed territories in the west of the USSR. The Gulag too was no longer quiescent. The arrest of Ukrainian and Baltic dissenters introduced into the labour camps an intransigent element, sustained by religious faith and national pride, which had hardly been noticed in the Gulag complex before the war.

  If a totalitarian state could not stop protests and strikes in its detention zones, something was wrong — and several of the Kremlin leaders were aware of this even if they kept the knowledge secret from Stalin. The unrest in the Gulag happened despite the intensification of repressive campaigns. Even in the more established parts of the USSR there were aspects of belief and behaviour which remained stubbornly unamenable to political manipulation. The coercive agencies in the war had concentrated their efforts on eradicating defeatism. Yet many people, especially youngsters, simply wanted to get on with their personal lives without the state’s interference. Western music and, in some instances, even Western clothes fashions were adopted by young people.18 The alienation of Muscovite students in particular was pronounced. And skilled workers also refused to be gulled by official propaganda; they knew their value to industrial enterprises which were under instructions to raise production sharply. Labour discipline, no longer backed by legal sanctions as severe as in the pre-war years, was seldom enforceable.

  It was dangerous to present Stalin with reports on phenomena which he might blame on the person who was reporting. His associates censored themselves in communication with him.19 He ruled through the institutions and appointees he himself had put in place. He never visited a factory, farm or shop in the post-war years (apart from a trip to a market in Sukhum; this had also been no different in the 1930s).20 He received no visitors from outside the political milieu except for the brief sojourn of his childhood friends at one of his Black Sea dachas.21 He experienced the USSR and the world communist movement on paper in the form of decrees, reports and denunciations. He could not know everything.

  Stalin’s inability to eradicate apathy, chaos and disobedience continued. His was the primary responsibility for the decision to deliver a blow against popular aspirations to some permanent relaxation of the Soviet order. Assumptions that changes would be put in hand at the end of the war were crudely disappointed. The question arises of whether the life of workers, kolkhozniks and administrators would have been radically different if Stalin had died at the moment of military victory. The answer can only be guessed at, but it is difficult to see how such a regime could have remained in power if it had failed to continue to apply severe repression. The ruin of cities, villages and whole economic sectors placed a vast burden on the state budget. Things were made worse by security concerns. The race to develop nuclear weaponry was bound to be extremely costly for the Soviet Union. Although friendly diplomatic relations with the USA and even American financial assistance could have alleviated the situation, the essential problem would have remained: society below the level of the central and local elites was therefore likely to be asked to shoulder the burden in the form of a delay in improving living conditions — and without the Gulag and the security police agencies this was a situation which could not have been maintained.22

  Stalin’s associates needed to conserve the powers of repression if they wanted to survive. The moderation of many policies was not excluded by this; and in fact his associates quietly suggested a number of modifications to economic, national and foreign policy. But none of them was a procedural democrat or an advocate of a market economy. Stalin had them in personal thrall. But it was not just his terrifying nature which stopped radical reform from being attempted. The Soviet order had its own internal imperatives. It had never been as adaptive as capitalist societies in the West, and the conditions after the Second World War rendered its inflexibilities stronger than ever. Stalinism would outlast Stalin.

  46. THE OUTBREAK OF THE COLD WAR

  The USSR’s relationship with the world of capitalism was always volatile. The October 1917 Revolution shook the global order like an earthquake and the tremors were registered in the politics and diplomacy of both the Bolsheviks and their enemies in the West. No government thought the rivalry could forever remain unresolved. The axiom was that permanent coexistence was impossible and that one side or the other would eventually triumph. Yet the communist leaders concurred that direct military conflict should be avoided. Truman, Attlee and Stalin agreed on this without the need to discuss it; and when Stalin was asked his opinion by visiting foreign communists, he insisted that the Third World War which he and they as Marxist–Leninists regarded as inevitable was not going to happen. He thought his will and judgement superior to those of his counterparts in the West. He also believed in the greater internal strength of the communist order in a potential conflict with capitalist states. Communism had spread fast in Europe and Asia. Nuclear-weapon technology had been a sector of Soviet weakness but he was doing something about this. He had allocated the resources to acquire parity for his armed forces and aimed to catch up with the USA in military power.

  The USSR’s agreements with Western governments, from the commercial treaties of 1921 onwards, had been regarded by everyone on both sides as suspendable. Subsequent events confirmed this approach. In 1924 the United Kingdom tore up the treaty signed with Sovnarkom in 1921. The Japanese in 1938 and the Germans in 1941 went to war with the USSR despite earlier concordats. The coalition which Stalin formed with the United Kingdom and the USA in the Second World War had from the start been characterised by strain and suspicion. The leaders of the Grand Alliance had lived on their nerves. Only their common anti-Nazi interest had kept them on speaking terms. Communism and capitalism dealt uneasily with each other.

  Yet this does not explain why the coalition broke down when and in the way it did. Stalin had spent the war ranting about the perfidy of his foreign partners; and Truman had few illusions about the ruthless ambitions of the Sov
iet leader. It was not just a question of clashing ideologies and personalities. The states of the Grand Alliance had divergent interests. The United Kingdom wished to preserve its empire intact while the USSR and the USA aspired to have it dismantled. The USA aimed at hegemony in Europe and the Far East: this was bound to agitate the Soviet political leadership after the protracted struggle against Germany and Japan. Yet the USSR had brought eastern and east-central Europe under its direct dominion despite the Grand Alliance’s promise to liberate all nations from wartime subjugation. The fact that the Soviet economy, apart from its armaments sector, was in ruins strengthened Truman’s confidence. The USA flexed the muscles of its financial and industrial might around the globe, and until 1949 the USA had atomic weapons and the USSR had none. This was a dangerous world situation. The practical moves of Stalin and Truman had to be calculated with care if military conflict was to be avoided.

  Stalin was given an inkling of future difficulty even as the Germans were going down to defeat. Lend–Lease aid was stopped without warning on 8 May 1945, and the ships on the high seas were ordered back to the USA. The USSR had served its military purpose for the Americans; it now had to show it deserved any further assistance. American actions in western Europe conformed to this pattern. Both overt and clandestine support was given to political groups in France and Italy dedicated to undermining the growth of communist influence. A blind eye was turned to General Franco’s advocacy of Hitler’s cause as Spain too was brought under American hegemony. The British assisted royalist forces in Greece in crushing the large armed units of communists. The Truman administration pursued the military and economic interests of American capitalism on every continent. Air force bases were acquired in Africa and Asia.1 Pro-Washington dictatorships were helped to power in Central and South America. The British and Americans intervened in the Middle East to guarantee their access to cheap oil and petrol. American general Douglas MacArthur was given plenipotentiary authority in Japan until such time as he could establish a state in line with the USA’s political orientation.