A history of Russia

by Riazanovsky

  Churchill, at the time out of office, in a speech in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, stressed the danger to the democratic world of the Communist expansion. He was one of the first Western statesmen to point out this danger. When another year of negotiations with the U.S.S.R. produced no results, President Truman appealed to Congress for funds to provide mili-

  tary and economic aid to the neighbors of the U.S.S.R. - Greece and Turkey - the independence of which was threatened directly or indirectly by the Communist state; this policy came to be known as the Truman Doctrine. In June 1947 the Marshall Plan was introduced to help rebuild the economies of European countries devastated by war. Because the Soviet Union and its satellites would not participate, the plan became a powerful bond for the Western bloc. Next, in 1949, twelve Western countries, the United States, Great Britain, Canada, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, and Portugal signed the Atlantic Defense Pact of mutual aid against aggression. A permanent North Atlantic Treaty Organization and armed force were subsequently created, under General Eisenhower's command. Also in 1949, the U.S. Congress passed a broad Mutual Defense Assistance Program to aid American allies all over the world. With these agreements and with numerous bases girding the U.S.S.R., the United States and other countries were finally organized to meet the Soviet threat.

  The Communist bloc also organized. In 1947 the Communist Information Bureau, known as Cominform, replaced the Communist International which had been disbanded in 1943. Bringing together the Communist parties of the U.S.S.R., eastern Europe, France, and Italy, the Cominform aimed at better co-ordination of Communist efforts in Europe. Zhdanov, who represented the Soviet party, set the unmistakably militant tone of the organization. But Communist co-operation was dealt a major blow by the break between Yugoslavia and the U.S.S.R., backed by its satellites, in the summer of 1948. Tito chose to defy Stalin because he wanted to retain full effective control of his own country and resented the role assigned to Yugoslavia in the economic plans and other plans of the Soviet bloc. He succeeded in his bold undertaking because he had a strong organization and support at home in contrast to other eastern European Communist leaders, many of whom were simply Soviet puppets, and because the Soviet Union did not dare invade Yugoslavia, apparently from fear of the probable international complications. Tito's unprecedented defection created the new phenomenon of "national" communism, independent of the Soviet bloc. It led to major purges of potential heretics in other eastern European Communist parties, which took the lives of some of the most important Communists of eastern Europe and resembled in many respects the great Soviet purge of the thirties.

  The Western world confronted the Soviet in many places and on many issues. Continuous confrontation in the United Nations resulted in little more than Soviet Russia's constant use of its veto power in the Security Council. Thus, of the eighty vetoes cast there in the decade from 1945 to 1955, seventy-seven belonged to the Soviet Union. The two sides also faced each other in Germany. Because of the new enmity of the wartime allies, the

  Allied Control Council in Germany failed to function almost from the beginning, and no agreement could be reached concerning the unification of Germany or the peace treaty with that country. Finally, the Federal Republic of Germany with its government in Bonn was established in the Western-occupied zones in May 1949, while the German Democratic Republic was created in the Soviet-held area in October of the same year. The first naturally sided with the West and eventually joined NATO. The second formed an integral part of the Soviet bloc. Cold war in Germany reached its height in the summer of 1948 when Soviet authorities stopped the overland supply of the American, British, and French sectors of Berlin. Since that city, located 110 miles within the Soviet zone, was under the jurisdiction of the four powers, three of them Western, it, or rather West Berlin, remained a highly provocative and disturbing "window of freedom" in rapidly Communized eastern Germany and eastern Europe. But Soviet hopes to force the Western powers to abandon their part of the city failed: a mammoth airlift was maintained for months by American and British planes to keep West Berlin supplied until the Soviet Union discontinued its blockade.

  Postwar events in Asia were as important as the developments in Europe. Communists made bids to seize power in such different areas as Indonesia, Malaya, and Burma. They succeeded in China. The great Chinese civil war ended in 1949 with Chiang Kai-shek's evacuation to Formosa - or Taiwan - and the proclamation of the Communist Chinese People's Republic, with Mao Zedong at its head, on the mainland. While the Soviet Union took no direct part in the Chinese war and at first apparently even tried to restrain Mao, it helped Chinese Communists with supplies and backed fully Mao's new regime. And indeed Communist victory in a country of great size inhabited by some half a billion people meant an enormous accretion of strength to the Soviet bloc, although it also created serious problems: China could not be expected to occupy the role of a satellite, such as Bulgaria or Czechoslovakia, and the Communist world acquired in effect a second center of leadership. By an agreement concluded in 1950, the U.S.S.R. ceded to Communist China its railroad possessions in Manchuria, although briefly retaining a naval base at Port Arthur.

  In Korea cold war turned to actual hostilities. There, as in Germany, no agreement could be reached by the victorious powers, and eventually two governments were formed, one in American-occupied southern Korea and the other in the Soviet north, the thirty-eighth parallel dividing the two. At the end of June 1950, North Korea attacked South Korea. In the ensuing years of fighting, which resulted in the two sides occupying approximately the same positions when the military action stopped as they had in the beginning, U.S. forces and some contingents from other countries came to the assistance of South Korea in execution of a mandate of the United Na-

  tions, whereas tens and even hundreds of thousands of Chinese "volunteers" intervened on the North Korean side. The Soviet army itself did not participate in the war, although the North Koreans and the Chinese used Soviet-made aircraft and weapons, and although Soviet advisers, as well as Soviet pilots and other technicians, were in North Korea. Although the front became stabilized in the summer of 1951, no armistice could be concluded until the summer of 1953, after Stalin's death.

  The End of Stalin

  Stalin's final months had a certain weird quality to them. It could be that the madness that kept peering through the method during his entire rule asserted itself with new vigor. In any case, events which then transpired will have to be elucidated by future historians. With international tension high, dark clouds gathered at home. In January 1953, nine doctors were accused of having assassinated a number of Soviet leaders, including Zhdanov. Beria's police were charged with insufficient vigilance. The press whipped up a campaign against traitors. Everything pointed to another great purge. Then on March 4 it was announced that Stalin had suffered a stroke on the first of the month, and on the morning of the sixth the news came that he had died the previous night. Some of the dictator's entourage especially close to him disappeared at the same time.

  XL

  THE SOVIET UNION AFTER STALIN, 1953-85

  One of the fundamental principles of party leadership is collectivity in deciding all important problems of party work. It is impossible to provide genuine leadership if inner party democracy is violated in the party organization, if genuine collective leadership and widely developed criticism and self-criticism are lacking. Collectiveness and the collegium principle represent a very great force in party leadership…

  SLEPOV

  As long as we confine ourselves, in substance, to denouncing the personal faults of Stalin as the cause of everything we remain within the realm of the "personality cult." First, all that was good was attributed to the superhuman, positive qualities of one man: now all that is evil is attributed to his equally exceptional and even astonishing faults. In the one case, as well as in the other, we are outside the criterion of judgment intrinsic in Marxism. The true problems are evaded,
which are why and how Soviet society could reach and did reach certain forms alien to the democratic way and to the legality which it had set for itself, even to the point of degeneration…

  TOGLIATTI

  It is difficult to exaggerate the historical significance of the Sino-Soviet conflict. It has influenced every facet of international life, not to speak of the Soviet block itself. No analysis of the relationship between Washington and Moscow, of the problem of nuclear proliferation, or the orientation of Indian nationalism, of the thrust of revolutionary movements in the Third World would be complete without taking into account the impact of the increasingly bitter dispute between the two onetime seemingly close allies. For the international Communist movement, it has been a tragic disaster, comparable in some respects to the split in Christianity several centuries ago. The Communist and Christian experience both showed that in theologically or ideologically oriented movements disagreements even only about means and immediate tactical concerns can escalate into basic organizational and doctrinal, indeed, even into national conflicts, fundamentally destructive of the movement's unity.

  BRZEZINSKI

  Stalin's stroke - if its official date is to be believed - was followed by three days of silence from the Kremlin and, in all probability, by hard bargaining among top Soviet leaders. When the dictator's demise was an-

  nounced, the new leadership proclaimed itself ready to govern the country, emphasizing the solidarity of its members as well as its unity with the people. The shrill tone and the constant repetition of both assertions must have covered many suspicions and fears. Malenkov emerged clearly in the chief role, for he became presumably both the senior Party secretary, which had been Stalin's most important office, and prime minister. Beria and Molotov stood next to Malenkov, forming a triumvirate of successors to the dictator. The three, in that order, were the key living figures during the burial of Stalin in the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square on the ninth of March, making appropriate speeches on the occasion.

  The Rise, Rule, and Fall of Nikita Khrushchev

  As early as the middle of March, however, it was announced that Malenkov had resigned as the Party secretary, although he remained prime minister and continued to be treated as the top personage in the Soviet Union. The new Presidium of the Party was reduced to ten members. Later it was announced that Khrushchev had been promoted to the position of first Party secretary, the title used instead of that of general secretary associated with Stalin. In the summer of 1953, Beria was arrested and then executed in secret, with a number of his followers, on charges of treason and conspiracy; or, as Khrushchev related to some visitors, Beria was killed at the Presidium meeting at which he had expected to assume full power. In any case, it would seem that in the race to dispose of one another Beria had narrowly lost out. Beria's fall marked a certain weakening in the power of the political police. In February 1955, Malenkov resigned as prime minister, saying that he was guilty of mistakes made in the management of Soviet agriculture and of having incorrectly emphasized the production of consumer goods at the expense of heavy industry. Nicholas Bulganin, a prominent Communist leader who had been a member of the Politburo since 1948, replaced Malenkov as head of the government. Bulganin and Khrushchev, the chief of the government and the chief of the Party, then occupied the center of the Soviet stage and also held the limelight in international affairs, suggesting to some observers the existence of something resembling a diarchy in the U.S.S.R. Marshal Zhukov, a great hero of the Second World War who had been reduced by Stalin to provincial commands and had returned to prominence after Stalin's death, took over Bulganin's former office of minister of defense. Zhukov's rise marked the first appearance of an essentially military, rather than Party, figure in high governing circles in Soviet Russia.

  The struggle in the Kremlin continued. Probably its most astounding event was Khrushchev's speech to a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, in which the new first secretary denounced his

  predecessor, Stalin, as a cruel, irrational, and bloodthirsty tyrant, who had destroyed many innocent with the guilty in his great purge oi the Party and the army in the thirties and at other times. In fact, Stalin and the "cult of personality" he had fostered were blamed also for military unpreparedness and defeats in the Second World War as well as for other Soviet mistakes and weaknesses. At the same time, paradoxically, Khrushchev presented Stalin's colossal aberrations as mere deviations of an essentially correct policy, entirely rectified by the collective leadership that replaced the despot. Khrushchev's explosive speech remains difficult to explain: after all, it was certain to produce an enormous shock among Communists and do great damage to the Communist cause - to say the least, the transition from years of endless adulation of Stalin to Khrushchev's revelations was bound to be breathtaking; besides, Khrushchev could not help but implicate himself and his associates, at least indirectly, in Stalin's crimes and errors. The answer to the riddle of the speech lies probably in the exigencies of the struggle for power among Soviet leaders. Khrushchev's sensational denunciation of Stalin struck apparently at some "old Stalinists," his main competitors. Besides, it would seem that Khrushchev tried both to put the blame for many of the worst aspects of the Soviet past on Stalin, implying that these evils could not happen again, and to set the correct line of policy for the future.

  The conflict at the top reached its culmination in the spring and early summer of 1957, after the Hungarian rebellion of the preceding autumn and certain other events at home and abroad had raised grave questions concerning the orientation and activities of the new Soviet administration and indeed concerning the stability of the whole Soviet system. Defeated in the Presidium of the Party, Khrushchev took his case to its entire Central Committee, successfully reversing the unfavorable decision and obtaining the ouster from the Presidium and other positions of power of the "anti-Party group" of Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Dmitrii Shepilov, a recent addition to the Soviet front ranks. While Khrushchev's enemies were dropped from the Presidium, its membership was increased to fifteen, giving the general secretary further opportunities to bring his supporters into that extremely important body. Marshal Zhukov, who, it would seem, had provided valuable assistance to Khrushchev in the latter's bid for power, again fell into disgrace several months later. Finally in March 1958, Bulganin, who had been disloyal to Khrushchev the preceding year, resigned as head of the government. Khrushchev himself replaced Bulganin, thus combining the supreme effective authority of the Party and of the state. Clearly that self-made man of peasant background and limited education no longer had any equals within the collective leadership or elsewhere in the U.S.S.R.

  The remarkable Twenty-second Party Congress held in the second half

  of October, 1961, confirmed on the whole Khrushchev's dominant position. As expected, it gave ready approval to the new leader's twenty-year program of "building communism" and denounced his enemies at home and abroad. Another old leader, Voroshilov, was linked to the "anti-Party group." In a much more unexpected development, however, Khrushchev and the Congress returned to the grizzly issue of Stalinism, detailing and documenting many of its atrocities. The removal of Stalin's body from the mausoleum in Red Square, the renaming of the cities named after Stalin, with Stalingrad becoming Volgograd, and the publicity given for the first time to certain aspects of the great purge must have had a powerful impact on many Soviet minds.

  Yet, although Khrushchev managed to assert his will at the Twenty-second Party Congress and even evict Stalin from the mausoleum, it can be seen in retrospect that by 1961 his fortunes were on the decline. In fact, 1958 probably marked Khrushchev's zenith. The year followed the new leader's decisive victory over the "anti-Party group," and the sensational Soviet inauguration of the space age the preceding autumn. It was blessed with a bounteous harvest. In spite of serious problems, industrial production continued to grow at a high rate. The ebullient Khrushchev could readily believe that all roads led to a communism that was bound
to bury capitalism in the not-too-distant future.

  Disillusionments followed in rapid succession. Economic development went sour; Khrushchev's exhortations, and his economic, administrative, and party reorganizations, together with his hectic campaigns to remedy particular deficiencies - all to be discussed later in this chapter - were increasingly ineffective in resolving the crisis. In his last years and months in office Khrushchev saw the rate of industrial growth decline sharply while he had to resort to an unprecedented purchase of Canadian wheat to forestall hunger at home. De-Stalinization or, more broadly, a certain "liberalization" of Soviet life seemed to produce as many problems as it resolved. It led in effect to soul-searching and instability rather than to any outburst of creative communist energy. The world situation - also to be discussed later - deteriorated even more sharply from the Soviet point of view. In 1960 the conflict with China, which dated back at least to Khrushchev's original de-Stalinization of 1956, burst into the open, and from about 1963 the break between the former allies seemed irreparable. In the relations with the West, Khrushchev's aggressive enthusiasm, spurred by the successes of Soviet space technology, received repeated checks in Germany and finally suffered a smashing defeat in October 1962 in the crucial confrontation with the United States over the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Khrushchev's survival of the catastrophe of his apparently largely personal foreign policy might be considered a tribute to Soviet totalitarianism. Yet totalitarianism too was deteriorating in the Soviet Union. Ob-