Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  The verdict must remain open. One possibility is that he was murdered, probably with the connivance of Beria and Khrustalëv. Poison administered in Stalin’s food is the method usually touted; another suggestion is that Beria arranged for his men to enter the dacha and kill the Leader with a lethal injection. In one strange version it is alleged that the man who died at the Blizhnyaya house was not Stalin but his double; but this too is far-fetched speculation entirely without evidence (and indeed without an explanation of why, if the corpse belonged to a double, Stalin did not return to wreak vengeance on the plotters).

  The corpse was carried to the institute’s first floor on a stretcher and medical staff took over from guards who were still in a shocked condition — many were in tears. Khrustalëv alone stayed as the other guards went back downstairs to the vestibule. Stalin’s false teeth were removed and given to the guard commander for safekeeping. Like Lenin, Stalin was to be embalmed. He had complicated this task in 1952 by arresting Boris Zbarski, who had been in charge of the Mausoleum laboratory for many years.26 But the chemistry had long ago been recorded for others to use. Meanwhile Stalin’s corpse was laid out in a catafalque on Red Square.27 The same guards accompanied the body to the Hall of Columns down from Red Square, where it stayed until the day of the funeral.28 The order was given to convert the Lenin Mausoleum into a joint resting place for both Lenin and Stalin. There was nothing unexpected about this, even though Stalin had given no instructions. For two decades he had been hailed as the greatest living human being. The Presidium simply assumed that his corpse should receive the same treatment as Stalin had organised for Lenin in 1924.

  Radio and newspapers announced his death on 6 March. The popular shock was immense since no prior intimation of his physical collapse had been given; and indeed there had been no comment in previous years about the general decline in his health. Crowds gathered. Muscovites raced to catch a glimpse of the dictator’s remains before the funeral. Trains and buses from distant provinces were packed with passengers avid to see Stalin lying in state. By Metro and bus everyone came to the capital’s centre and then walked up on foot to the cobbled square with sombre eagerness. On 8 March the human mass became too large for the police to control. Far too many people were converging from all directions. Panic ensued as many tried to turn back. The result was disastrous. Thousands of individuals were trampled and badly injured, and the number of people who suffered fatal asphyxiation (which was withheld from the newspapers) went into the hundreds. Even in his coffin the Leader had not lost his capacity to deal out death at random to his subjects. There was another aspect to this tragedy: it indicated the limits of state control even in the USSR. Outward obedience to orders was shown most of the time; but the surface of public calm was a brittle one and the MVD was nervous of prohibiting ordinary people from doing what they wanted in the first couple of days after the news was broadcast.

  The funeral took place on 9 March. It was a cold, dry, grey day of late winter. The sun did not appear. Frost was heavy.29 The crowds were dense. Short journeys in the capital took several hours. The authorities were caught between wanting to be legitimated by association with his memory and ensuring the preservation of order on the streets. The Imperial regime had become intensely unpopular when thousands of spectators were accidentally trampled to death on Khodynka Field on the day of Nicholas II’s coronation. It would not do to allow a repetition of such an event with the passing of Joseph the Terrible.

  Any other outcome than a peaceful ceremony would have sent out the message that Stalin’s successors were unable to rule the country: they had to prove themselves men of steel like the deceased Leader. The catafalque at the Hall of Columns had a side-curtain proclaiming ‘Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!’ Only Stalin’s head and shoulders were left visible. His eyes were closed. Strong searchlights were trained on him. Official photographers were recurrently permitted to approach and record the occasion. Orchestras played. A female choir, dressed in black, sang dirges. At 10.30 a.m. the Party Presidium entered to the accompaniment of the USSR state hymn. Malenkov led the way, partnered by China’s representative Chou En-lai. A gun carriage bore the coffin out of the Hall of Columns up the slope to Red Square where the newly redesignated Lenin–Stalin Mausoleum awaited it. The corpse was removed from the gun carriage and transferred to a bier outside the building. Presidium members and honoured guests moved to the top of the Mausoleum.30 Across Red Square an enormous crowd had assembled. Microphones and amplifiers had been set up to enable all to hear the ceremony. Wreaths were piled high. (The composer Sergei Prokofiev had died on the same day as Stalin and his mourners found the shops empty of flowers because everyone had rushed to pay their respects to the Leader.) The passing of a political era was being marked.

  Detachments of the Soviet Army marched across Red Square. The MVD as usual organised security behind the crowd barriers. Military orchestras played the conventional dirges. Hundreds of thousands of Muscovites turned out to pay their last respects; and unlike on May Day or 7 November, when their work-organisations directly compelled them to take part in such ceremonies, the popular eagerness to be present on the historic day was unmistakable.

  There were three eulogies. Malenkov, Molotov and Beria gave them from the top of the Mausoleum. Those in proximity to the speakers could detect differences among them: only Molotov’s face betrayed sincere grief. Beria spoke with a brusque dryness (and was later rebuked for this by his wife Nina).31 Molotov’s prominence indicated to the politically well informed that tremors were already making themselves felt at the apex of Soviet politics: the corpse of Stalin had hardly cooled before his former leading accomplice had been readmitted to the ruling group. Foreign visitors were not confined to communists. Veteran communist leaders Chou En-lai, Palmiro Togliatti, Dolores Ibárurri and Maurice Thorez had pride of place; but others at the ceremony included Italian socialist leader Pietro Nenni. Condolences poured into Moscow from foreign governments. Stalin’s old negotiating rivals Churchill and Truman sent condolences. Newspapers in the communist countries stressed that the tallest giant of history was no more. In the West the reaction of the press was more diverse. Yet although his crimes against humanity were recorded, few editors wished to leave the occasion unaccompanied by reference to his part in the economic transformation of his country and the victory over the Third Reich. This was a gentler fate than he deserved.

  The world communist movement, however, did not question his services to humanity. He who had ordered the construction of the Lenin Mausoleum was about to join the founder of the Soviet Union in death. The embalmers completed their work. His corpse had been gutted and soaked in the liquid whose ingredients remained a secret. A glass cabinet had been commissioned. The internal layout of the rectangular granite structure was rearranged while masons changed its name to the Lenin–Stalin Mausoleum. Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhughashvili, known to history as Stalin, was laid to rest.

  55. AFTER STALIN

  A tidal wave of reforms crashed over Stalin’s policies in the USSR in the first week of March 1953. His successors were posthumously opposing him after decades of obedience. No member of the Party Presidium favoured the total conservation of his legacy; even communist conservatives like Molotov and Kaganovich approved some sort of innovation. Changes frustrated by Stalin at last became possible. Yet debate did not flood out into society. It was not allowed to. The last thing the ascendant party leaders wanted was to let ordinary Soviet citizens, or even the lower functionaries of the state, influence what was decided in the Kremlin.

  Molotov and Kaganovich could not prevent the reform projects of Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchëv. Malenkov wanted to increase payments to collective farms so as to boost agricultural production; he also favoured giving priority to light-industrial investment. Khrushchëv wished to plough up virgin lands in the USSR and end the decades-old uncertainty about supplies of bread. Malenkov and Beria were committed to making overtures to the USA for peaceful coexistence: they feared that
the Cold War might turn into a disaster for humanity. Beria desired a rapprochement with Yugoslavia; he also aimed to withdraw privileges for Russians in the USSR and to widen the limits of cultural self-expression. Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchëv agreed that public life should be conducted on a less violent and arbitrary basis than under Stalin. They supported the release of political convicts from the labour camps. Quietly they restrained the official media from delivering the customary grandiose eulogies to Stalin. If his policies were to be replaced, it no longer made sense to go on treating him as a demigod.

  The Party Presidium handled his physical legacy with caution. When Lenin had died in 1924, Stalin became the custodian of his writings and decided what should be published and what withheld from view. He published his own Foundations of Leninism. He sought legitimacy for whatever he was doing by reference to the works of Lenin. Stalin’s successors knew this. Sanctioned by the Party Central Committee on 5 March 1953,1 they commandeered his book collection and distributed most of it anonymously to various public libraries. Only a few hundred books were left with the Institute of Marxism–Leninism. Many of his letters and telegrams were incinerated and most drafts of his articles and books disappeared.2 The last edition of his collected works was suspended incomplete.3

  Stalin’s desk at the Blizhnyaya dacha held disturbing secrets. It contained three sheets of paper which he had hidden beneath a newspaper inside a drawer. One was a note from Tito:4

  Stalin: stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle… If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send a second.

  Thus did one gangster write to another. No one else had stood up to Stalin like this; perhaps this is why he kept the note. He had also conserved the last thing written to him by Bukharin: ‘Koba, why is my death necessary for you?’ Had Stalin wanted a frisson of satisfaction when re-reading it? (It cannot be believed that some distorted feeling of attachment to Bukharin lingered with him.) The third item was the letter dictated by Lenin on 5 March 1922 containing the demand for Stalin to apologise to Krupskaya for his verbal abuse of her. It was his last message from Lenin and it was the most wounding. He would not have conserved it in the desk unless it had echoed round the caverns of his mind.

  The party leaders kept the three items a secret. But they changed public discourse after Stalin’s death and Pravda restrained its praise of him. Articles criticised the ‘cult of the individual’. Although these were laden with citations of Stalin’s works, it took no feat of memory to recall that his cult had been the most grandiose in history. While fresh policies were being discussed in the Party Presidium, Beria celebrated his return to the leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs by collecting tape recordings of Stalin’s conversations with the police agencies. The tapes proved that Stalin was plotting terror to the end. Beria arranged for Central Committee members to read the transcripts.5

  The reformers faced a dilemma: if they advertised any abandonment of Stalin’s legacy, there would be a questioning of their legitimate claim to rule; but if they were slow to alter some policies they might meet trouble for ignoring the discontents of society. There was a further difficulty. Stalin was revered by many of those people — and there were millions of them — who had hated his repressions. The despot still exercised his spell in death. Reformers had to be seen behaving firmly and competently. Signs of panic might ignite a challenge to the whole Soviet order. The majority in the Presidium sought to alter Stalin’s policies without expressly criticising him.6 At Party Central Committee meetings they merely alluded to Stalin’s unpredictability and capriciousness in his last years. This happened at the plenum in July 1953 after Beria’s arrest on the trumped-up charge of being a British intelligence agent. Really the leadership feared that Beria was lusting after his own personal supremacy as well as planning reforms which seemed excessively radical. It was Beria, not Stalin, who was held responsible for the past crimes and abuses, and he was executed in December 1953.7

  Stalin’s family experienced an abrupt change in circumstances. His daughter Svetlana sensibly changed her surname. As a student she had been known as Svetlana Stalina but after his death she called herself Svetlana Allilueva.8 By bowing low before her father’s successors, she saved herself from trouble. Vasili Stalin was incapable of such an adjustment. He was notorious for drunken party-going and debauchery. His father virtually disowned him, but only after the Leader’s death was Vasili called to account and arrested for rowdiness and misuse of public funds. His days of privilege were at an end.

  The Ministry of Internal Affairs was brought under the party’s control after the fall of Beria. The limits on cultural expression continued to be widened. Malenkov and Khrushchëv carried on promoting reforms while competing for personal supremacy. Prices paid for the harvest to collective farms were raised. The virgin soil of Kazakhstan was ploughed up to increase the volume of agricultural production. A rapprochement took place with Tito’s Yugoslavia. Overtures were made to the USA for a lessening of international tensions. The Korean War was brought to a close. Discussions at the Central Committee became less governed by the need to show unequivocal support for every action of the Party Presidium. Although the USSR remained a one-party dictatorship, the atmosphere of general fear had been lightened. The rivalry between Malenkov and Khrushchëv kept growing. Beria had been feared equally for his reformist radicalism and his personal ruthlessness. Malenkov lacked his panache and Khrushchëv, benefiting from his reputation as the conqueror of Beria, emerged as the supreme leader in the Presidium within a couple of years.

  At his instigation a commission examined material on the purges of the Stalin period. Khrushchëv, while searching for damaging evidence about Malenkov, also had a larger agenda. Several Party Presidium members objected to any further reforms. To secure his ascendancy Khrushchëv raised the Stalin question at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956. When comments were made about the danger of destabilising the Soviet order, he retorted: ‘If we don’t tell the truth at the Congress, we’ll still be forced to tell the truth at some time in the future. And then we won’t be the people making the speeches. No, instead we’ll be the people under investigation!’9 At a closed session of the Congress he denounced Stalin as a monstrous individual who had sent thousands to their deaths and broken with Leninist traditions in leadership and policy. The charge sheet was not a comprehensive one. Khrushchëv focused his report on Stalin’s activity from Kirov’s death in 1934 onwards. He avoided criticism of the basic political and economic structures set up in the late 1920s, and he said nothing about the terror conducted by Stalin in the Civil War and the First Five-Year Plan. Wanting to ingratiate himself with current party and governmental officials, he gave the impression that their predecessors had been the main victims of the Great Terror of 1937–8.

  The Congress audience was stunned into silence. Khrushchëv had achieved his purpose: he had made it difficult for his Soviet opponents to attack his leadership and policies without seeming to advocate a reversion to state terror. Yet there was a problem. It had been Stalin who had established the communist states in Europe’s eastern half. By discrediting Stalin, Khrushchëv reasserted a line of legitimacy in the Soviet Union stretching from Lenin and the October Revolution. This was not the case in eastern Europe, where it was Stalin who had installed communism. Khrushchëv’s report was political dynamite there. Strikers organised protest demonstrations in Poland. By October 1956 a popular revolt had broken out in Hungary.

  Opponents of reform struck back in the Party Presidium in June 1957, calling for Khrushchëv’s removal as Party First Secretary. But the Central Committee protected him and, after years of further struggle, he delivered a still more devastating attack on Stalin at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in October 1961. Old Bolshevik Dora Lazurkina was given the podium. Bent with years, Lazurkina told how the shade of Lenin had appeared in a dream to her demanding to res
t alone in the Mausoleum on Red Square. This sentiment evoked tumultuous applause. The deed was done at dead of night and Stalin’s embalmed corpse was taken out of the Mausoleum and buried below the Kremlin Wall; a simple bust and pillar were placed above his grave only years later. The historians were ordered to search the archives for proof that Stalin had frequently fallen out with Lenin and always behaved brutally. Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd. The Lenin cult was joined by a growing cult of Khrushchëv. A new party-history textbook appeared in 1959.10 Those communists who admired Stalin kept quiet or risked expulsion from the party ranks. Only a few communist parties abroad dissented. Chief among them was the Communist Party of China. Mao Tse-tung had resented Stalin in life but thought Khrushchëv’s policies of reform made too great a rupture with the kind of communism espoused by both Stalin and Mao. This contrast added to the tensions, leading to a rift between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China.

  Khrushchëv was removed from power in 1964. The Party Politburo (as the Presidium was renamed) ditched the more idiosyncratic of his policies at home and abroad; it also stifled dissenting opinion more harshly than under Khrushchëv. But this was a modification of Khrush-chëv’s programme rather than a reversion to full Stalinism. The new Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev never contemplated terror or individual despotism. ‘Stability of cadres’ became a slogan. Behind the scenes, however, the Politburo seriously considered rehabilitating Stalin’s historical image in 1969 on the occasion of his birthday. A laudatory Pravda editorial was prepared. Only a last-minute intervention by Italian and French communist party leaders prevented publication. (This was too late, however, to stop the Mongolian Communist Party from printing it as Ulan Bator lies in an earlier time zone.)