Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  Exactly why Stalin had suddenly changed his preferences remains mysterious. It may be that he was genuinely annoyed by the revelations of sloppy standards in the aircraft-production industry. Perhaps, however, he was looking for any pretext whatever to keep the entire Politburo on its toes — and there was no member of the Politburo who eventually failed to incur his disapproval. Possibly Stalin’s fondness for Zhdanov also played a part; Molotov recalled: ‘Stalin loved Zhdanov more than all the rest.’7 With Zhdanov at his right arm, Stalin moved against Mikoyan. This was not their first contretemps in recent years. In 1944 Stalin had ‘crudely’ rejected Mikoyan’s proposal to give grain seeds for winter sowing to the restored collective farms of Ukraine: he accused Mikoyan of acting in ‘an anti-state fashion’.8 In December 1946 this turned into permanent hostility on Stalin’s part when he accused him of supporting moves to yield to the USA’s conditions for increased mutual trade.9

  No one was safe. The Party Central Committee at Stalin’s request promoted Voznesenski, a Leningrader, to the Politburo in February 1947. But Stalin at the same time elevated Nikolai Bulganin to membership: he did not want a Leningrad group to enjoy unrivalled power at the centre. Indeed he never let a new balance rest for long. Agitation of the scales was a feature of his rule, and he was most unlikely to keep Zhdanov as his permanent favourite. Molotov and Mikoyan, however, faded from view. Invited to eat with Stalin in Myussery in 1948, they were hurt by a little scene involving Poskrëbyshev. In the middle of the meal, Poskrëbyshev suddenly turned to Stalin and said: ‘Comrade Stalin, while you’ve been on vacation down here in the south, Molotov and Mikoyan in Moscow have been organising a plot against you.’10 The two accused understood that Stalin had stage-managed the scene; and when they protested their innocence, Stalin accepted their protestations. But they never came back into his favour. According to Mikoyan, Stalin’s ‘capriciousness’ became evident only from the last years of the war. Mikoyan fooled himself. He failed to recall that Stalin in power had always revelled in arbitrary methods. The difference was that Mikoyan, after a career of enjoying Stalin’s favour, had only recently become a victim of them.

  If Mikoyan had a point, it was that Stalin from the last years of the war began to act more oddly than ever towards his entourage in social surroundings. They had been fearful of him before 1941. They had never been able to predict whether they might be picked on by him and arrested. But as victory in the war approached and Stalin resumed convivial behaviour, he enjoyed toying with their feelings. They thought this a sign of deterioration rather than the gradual extension of an existing trend. They were political survivors but unsophisticated psychologists despite their expertise in handling his moods over several decades.

  Kremlin politics began to favour Malenkov and Beria when, in August 1948, Zhdanov died after lengthy treatment in a clinic. Plagued by alcoholism and cardiac disease, he had been poorly for years. But a rumour spread that his doctors had killed him. One of the clinic’s medical officers, Lidia Timashuk, filed complaints about the shoddy treatment he had received. Although Stalin’s office received the dossier on Zhdanov, no action followed — he may not in fact have scrutinised it at the time. He had anyway ceased to show favour towards Zhdanov for some months, and now he empowered Malenkov and Beria to follow up his death with an investigation of the political situation in Leningrad. Malenkov, a baby-faced and overweight apparatchik with a terrifying record in the Great Terror, claimed to find evidence of a conspiracy aimed at Stalin and the Kremlin. Stalin was sufficiently convinced that the Leningraders had been insubordinate in policy to sanction a massive political purge throughout the city’s party and government leadership. Executions followed in 1950. Malenkov returned to the Kremlin as Stalin’s favourite for the next few years.

  Not all Leningrad politicians had associated themselves with Zhdanov’s quest for a widening of the party’s political functions. But many had done so, and the city had a reputation for harbouring those who retained a commitment to the party’s importance, to ideology and to the curbing of technocratic tendencies in the vast apparatus of the Council of Ministers.11 Lined up against Zhdanov had been Malenkov and Beria, who advocated greater latitude for the ministries to take up the task of economic regeneration. In the mandatory opaque language they stressed a preference for putting specialists in charge of affairs. Expertise rather than ideology should predominate. The division between the two sides was not entirely clear-cut. Beria and Malenkov did not advocate the party’s removal from the country’s administration. Both were also associated with the organs of repression even though Beria ceased being the leader of the security organs from 1945. To some extent their opinions reflected the interests of the institutions they currently headed — and this had been true also for Zhdanov. But a dispute of intrinsic importance had divided them. Stalin would have to resolve it somehow.

  The Leningrad Affair was the first blood-purge of the communist political elite since 1938. The deportations, arrests and executions after the Second World War had been aimed at specific social categories, especially leading figures in public and economic life in the newly annexed Baltic states. Stalin had also put returning prisoners-of-war to forced labour in the camps of the Gulag. But the incarceration of the Leningraders was different because the victims belonged to the highest echelons of officialdom in the USSR. This time he did not bother with show trials. Hundreds of party and government functionaries were thrown into prison and shot. Among them were Politburo member Nikolai Voznesenski, Central Committee Secretary Alexei Kuznetsov, RSFSR Prime Minister Mikhail Rodionov and Leningrad Party First Secretary Pëtr Popkov.

  Although Stalin did not disclose his motives, those of Malenkov and Beria may easily be guessed. They had always resented Zhdanov’s authority and his political clientele in Leningrad. Soviet public life was a snake pit and Malenkov and Beria were two of its anacondas. Their opportunity to suffocate Zhdanov’s associates had arrived. But why did Stalin agree? Probably he had come to resent the way that Voznesenski had spoken up against him in wartime; Voznesenski was also the only Politburo member to write a best-selling book after the war. It may well be that his growing status as a politician irritated Stalin just as Zhukov had annoyed him as a commander. At any rate when Voznesenski was discovered to have mislaid important Gosplan data, there was a chance for Malenkov, who had always hated him personally,12 to accuse him of irresponsible and even traitorous behaviour.13 Voznesenski was also found to have withheld information on discrepancies between state economic plans and the real economic situation. Straight-talking Voznesenski was shown to be a deceiver. Although everyone in the political leadership was deceitful, Voznesenski had had the ill luck to be discovered. To Stalin’s mind, a Politburo member could commit no fouler offence than fail to be honest with him.

  Others in Leningrad had also offended Stalin. The leadership in Leningrad, ‘hero-city’ in the Great Patriotic War, had cultivated local patriotism. Capital of the Russian Empire since the reign of Peter the Great, it remained a rival to Moscow after the transfer of the seat of government to Moscow in March 1918. Leningrad’s inhabitants thought they had survived the German onslaught more by their own determination than by assistance from the Kremlin. The city was starting to seem like Russia’s capital in a Soviet multinational state — the USSR — based in Moscow.

  The leadership of party and government in the city had begun to give signs of overstepping the limits Stalin had approved.14 Much as he liked to incorporate the national pride of Russians in doctrine and policy, he never lost his concern about the possible growth of nationalism among them. The Leningrad political elite failed to comprehend the rules of the situation. Kuznetsov had organised a retail fair in Leningrad for all parts of the RSFSR without the Kremlin’s permission and Rodionov had called for a special ‘Bureau for the RSFSR’.15 Voznesenski had not worked in Leningrad since before the war; but Stalin sensed a nationalist streak in him and told Mikoyan: ‘For him not only the Georgians and Armenians but even the Ukrain
ians aren’t real people.’16 Furthermore, the Leningraders, including Zhdanov, had enthused about the Yugoslavs after the Second World War. Tito and the Yugoslavs advocated a more radical communisation of eastern Europe.17 Stalin had not demurred at the time; but when he and Tito fell out, Zhdanov’s known inclination — even if it had had Stalin’s endorsement at the time — may have made him suspect that the USSR’s ‘second capital’ was a nest of treachery. Voznesenski had been highly favoured in wartime, and Kuznetsov in 1948 had even been mentioned by Stalin as his possible successor.18

  Stalin was not really threatened by them. No Leningrad leader was demonstrably eager to promote a Russian nationalist cause. The only serious source of worry was that they sought to dig autonomous foundations for the RSFSR within the USSR. But always extremely wary, Stalin left nothing to chance. The Leningraders were arrested, interrogated and shot. They had not been a cohesive group with a uniform and agreed programme; and some of them — notably Politburo member and Gosplan Chairman Voznesenski — had interests which conflicted with Zhdanov’s emphasis on the virtues of the party. But enough of them were in agreement in the political discussions after the war for them to be regarded as a potential orientation inside the supreme ruling coterie.19

  The Leningrad Affair did not halt dispute about policy. Certainly the position of the ministerial apparatus was consolidated to the detriment of the party, and trained specialists in economic and social sectors of public life — and indeed in political ones — were left undisturbed by party and police. Having toyed with measures to raise the popular standard of living, Stalin had reverted to older priorities. The Cold War imposed colossal budgetary strains on the already damaged Soviet economy. Dispositions were made to maximise heavy-industrial production and resources were devoted in abundance to the armed forces and the armaments factories as well as to the development of nuclear weapons. Xenophobic statements were issued about world affairs; little remained of the restraints characteristic of the Grand Alliance. The wartime cultural relaxation was revoked and persecution of the creative intelligentsia was resumed. Things Russian attracted extravagant praise. Marxism–Leninism in its peculiar Stalinist variant was at the centre of the propaganda of press, radio and schooling. Punitive procedures were tightened; prisoners released at the end of their sentences in the Gulag were rearrested and either sent back to camps or transferred to special settlements.

  Stalin liked the world to believe that debate about primary aspects of policy had ceased to be necessary and that a popular consensus existed in the USSR. Thus any reconsideration of the ‘line of the day’ was a waste of time at best and a heresy and danger to state interests at worst. Supposedly Stalin’s ideas were exactly those of the party and of the working class. Nevertheless some members of his entourage felt that several sectors of public life required reform. Malenkov believed that light-industrial production should be prioritised notwithstanding the deterioration in relations between the USA and the USSR. Beria agreed (and after Stalin’s death he co-operated with Malenkov in seeking to foster reconciliation between the former military allies). Probably Malenkov and Beria also concurred that the breach with Yugoslavia had been undesirable. Malenkov, though, was less eager than Khrushchëv to acknowledge the existence of an agricultural emergency in the USSR. He also declined to admit the dangers, identified by Beria, which were posed by the exacerbation of national feelings among the non-Russian peoples. The supreme leadership was riddled by suppressed disputes along a range of current policies.

  It was one thing for Stalin to develop an idiosyncratic structure for the Soviet political leadership and entirely another to keep it standing. By playing with the fate of his subordinates, he risked destabilising the whole state order, as had happened in 1937–8. The institutions controlling society, the economy and culture needed to maintain their authority. Society was cowed but it was capable of bursting into rebellion: the history of popular revolts in the Russian Empire provided a warning against official complacency. This was not Stalin’s sole calculation. He knew that, if he removed his subordinates in one great purge, he would bring himself into disrepute. He had picked all of them and his judgement would be put under question. Furthermore, Stalin also had to be wary of the reaction of his intended victims. If he made them feel frightened about his intentions, they might attempt a coup. He therefore moved against individuals rather than the whole group. Stalin was not omnipotent. He needed to act with caution, moving against his subordinates in stages.

  There abides an image of Stalin as ruler which shows him as a despot unprecedented in history. More than Louis XIV, he could accurately claim: ‘L’État, c’est moi.’ The Great Terror had resulted in total victory. The lasting institution of supreme power and authority — the party — was conquered by his bloody methods and subsequently he could do more or less what he pleased. All institutions were in permanent contest with each other at a level vastly lower than Stalin’s imperial throne. Institutions certainly mattered. But they received their orders from the celestial heights without being able to amend the contents. They functioned as Stalin’s administrative conveyor belts, their task being to carry out whatever errands he had set for each particular day. The leaders of institutions were in post solely at his whim, and they discharged their duties to the letter of his expressed will. Institutions and leaders were therefore mere extensions of Stalin’s declared wishes and intimations. Politics in any generally accepted sense had ceased. An administrative behemoth ran the USSR whose master was the pockmarked little psychopath. According to such imagery, Stalin was totalitarianism in human form.

  Central bodies were not the only problem. Each institution had its internal discrepancies. The centre vied with its local adjuncts. Leaders in Moscow tried to increase their authority by introducing their personal supporters to posts at lower levels. Patronage was normalised as a political phenomenon. Stalin could weaken its effect by placing rivals in particular institutions; but he could not eliminate it entirely, and since the end of the Great Terror had not made it his business to try. He could also insert his own chosen appointees into the provincial tiers. Yet for all this a great deal of energy was necessary. Stalin had possessed it in the 1930s even if he made choices based more on guesswork than on acquaintance with functionaries — he had ceased to meet provincial delegations as a matter of course in the late 1920s. In fact he rarely intervened in the huge process of non-central appointments after 1945. He was too old and exhausted and other things were on his mind: grand foreign and economic policy, the Korean War, the world communist movement and his political supremacy.

  Stalinist governance stayed as contradictory as ever. Enormous power accrued to Stalin and his subordinates in the Politburo, and only saints or fools criticised the right to rule or the contents of their policies. Elections were a sham. Consultation of popular opinion never occurred. The obligation of Soviet citizens was to listen to orders and accede to doctrines. Hierarchical command had become a normal and prime aspect of governance and anyone challenging this development of the Soviet order — and even many who did not dare to challenge it — was certain to end up against a wall or in a labour camp. The immense, active power of the state was irresistible and few made the attempt to resist. Just a handful of brave Russian students got together in universities and discussed schemes for a reversion of ideology and practice to true Leninism. Religious dissenters too continued to hold secret meetings. Some intellectuals went on writing despite there being no prospect of publication. The armed partisan groups in Ukraine and the Baltic states, though diminished, had not yet been eliminated. But across the face of the USSR the forces of resistance to Stalinism were weak. On the back of that mighty state sat Joseph Stalin — Soso to his ageing school friends, Joseph to the Alliluevs, the Boss to the Politburo and Father of the Peoples to his citizen subjects. The despot’s hands retained their tight grip on the levers of power; and as long as he drew breath, he could not be budged.

  Appearances did not deceive: he was the unchal
lengeable despot. But those appearances so dazzled that they occluded his weaknesses from view. At the lower levels of state and society the infringements of the hierarchical principle were systemic. Not only in politics but throughout the administrative stratum of the USSR there was theft, corruption, nepotism, informal patronage, misreporting and general disorder. Regional, institutional and local interests were defended. The Soviet order paid workers and kolkhozniks a pittance but failed to impose a pattern of labour compliance conventional in the West. At the tasks of micromanagement this totalitarian system was an abject failure.

  Stalin gave no sign that he knew this. Not once after the Second World War did he visit a factory, farm or even administrative office. He ruled by his wits. Seeing his fellow politicians, he tried to prise out of them such information as they contrived to keep from him. He held his dinner parties. He kept regular contacts with his organs of surveillance. He gave his orders and sent threatening telegrams. He closed off channels for the propagation of doctrine and opinions different from his own. He arranged arrests. Yet his ‘omnipotence’ did not permit him to perfect the pyramidal order. The lowest levels of the structure were constantly found out of place by his inspectors, but they had long ago ceased to tell him the full truth. When defects were announced to him, it was de rigueur to suggest that saboteurs, diversionists or foreign agents had been at work. No one dared insist that the trouble was inherent in the Soviet order and in the policies introduced and implemented by Stalin. It was the ultimate vicious circle. Stalin knew only what he wanted to know. His subordinates tried to tell him only what he wanted or what they wanted him to know. The Leader with the most penetrative power of any contemporary ruler was walled off from the modalities of the Soviet order at its lower levels. Master of all he surveyed, he saw only a small part of his country’s realities and controlled even less.