The news was greeted with relief by many, but the predominant reaction was sorrow. This was only partly a result of deliberate image-building, which presented him as a great war leader with an affinity to Ivan IV in his youthful, conquering phase. Stalin was genuinely popular, despite — even because of - the blood he had shed. As a British historian writes, ‘Unpalatable as it may be … for liberals both East and West to admit that tyranny and terror can have a certain popular appeal, to pretend otherwise does not help us understand these phenomena’. 10 But with Stalin gone the atmosphere slowly changed.
The telephone rang in a flat overlooking Suvorov Avenue in Leningrad. A young woman answered. A harsh voice, sounding like a demon from Hades, asked rudely who had answered the call. She gave her name. Then the voiced rasped out her father’s name. Her father had been arrested in the 1930s; there had been no news of him since. He would arrive within the hour, barked the caller, and hung up. Minutes later there was a knock at the door. Her father, long feared dead, had returned. 11 There were many such reunions in this period — and many sadder resolutions too.
Fears of another period of terror, which had grown again with the alleged ‘Doctors’ Plot’ of 1952, slowly cleared. It was three years after Stalin’s death, in February 1956, that a new Party Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, addressed a secret session of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. His text was soon leaked, no doubt deliberately, through a fraternal Polish delegate. And so the shattering news reached the Soviet people and the world: Khrushchev had denounced Stalin for making costly mistakes and ordering unnecessary killings. From then on changes came faster.
The Party line began to ease both in domestic affairs and in foreign policy. The strict controls favoured by Stalin could not be sustained indefinitely. In the Soviet Union itself economic plans were soon altered to provide more consumer goods, and Stalin’s demise excited greater expectations. But not all satellite leaders followed the new line, and a few weeks later workers in East Germany rebelled against excessive work norms imposed by Walter Ulbricht, the Party leader. Three years later a major revolt in Poland was narrowly averted by bringing the popular Wladyslaw Gomulka to power and raising living standards, but later that year, 1956, the forces of protest in Hungary produced a full-scale revolution which was suppressed only by the application of considerable force.
It was noted, however, that although the American-run Radio Free Europe had encouraged the rising in Hungary, Western forces did not intervene to help the insurgents. In the longer term it also became clear that, although collectivization was reimposed in Hungary (though not in Poland), it was done in a way that won acceptance. And if the Soviet regime was learning how to keep power through the judicious use of concession as well as repression, it was also proving adept at extending its influence abroad by the careful dispensation of aid. India, in particular, was courted. In 1953 a five-year trade agreement was signed with it, and two years later the Soviets undertook to build a steel plant there. 12 They also provided oil-prospecting equipment and a million tons of steel to assist India’s industrialization at a crucial stage, helped with mineral prospecting, and provided other technical aid. Economic help was paralleled by high-profile gestures of political co-operation. India’s leader Pandit Nehru was feted in Moscow; Khrushchev was festooned with garlands in Delhi. 13
Burma, Cambodia, Afghanistan and several African and Arab countries, especially Egypt, were also targeted as recipients of Soviet largesse and influence. Competition with the West for influence in non-aligned countries could be fierce, however, and it was expensive. In 1954 Moscow agreed to buy Burma’s entire rice crop when it was unable to sell it elsewhere; it also bought Iceland’s fish surplus at the time of the ‘cod war’ with Britain. But great powers were expected to act thus, and aid was an important element in a bigger, worldwide, struggle.
The West made a concerted effort to confine the Soviet Union to its sphere by building a series of military alliances: NATO to protect Western Europe and the Mediterranean; the Baghdad Pact which set up CENTO (an alliance which included Iran and Pakistan) for western Asia; and the South-East Asia Treaty Organization, which also included Pakistan. Moscow reacted sharply: Marshal Zhukov, now Soviet defence minister, warned the United States against interfering on the Soviet Union’s southern frontier. Russia had possessed a hydrogen bomb since 1953, but in 1957 NATO, led by the United States, raised the stakes still higher by introducing nuclear warheads and building bases for ballistic missiles of intermediate range. The Soviet reaction seemed intended to wrong-foot its rival: it suspended nuclear tests, undertook not to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances, and dropped plans to deploy them in East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia. It also undertook to scale down its conventional forces to a level that would maintain the existing balance between East and West. 14 This non-belligerent stance made for good public relations, but was deceptive. The Soviets proceeded with the development of their own inter-continental ballistic missiles, and test-fired one later that year. Then, in October, to the astonishment of much of the world, they launched the first space rocket to orbit the earth.
Soviet influence in the world now grew at a tremendous rate. Following a coup d’état, Iraq was persuaded to leave the Baghdad Pact and legalize a Communist Party. In 1959 Soviet engineers arrived in Egypt, which would not permit a Communist Party, to start work on a huge hydroelectric and irrigation project, the Aswan Dam. This scheme, intended to revolutionize Egyptian agriculture, soon came to symbolize Soviet prestige in Africa and the Middle East. The same year Fidel Castro took control of Cuba and, encountering difficulties with the United States, offered himself to Moscow as a protege. At the beginning of that year, in the course of announcing a new Seven Year Plan, Khrushchev boasted that by 1970 the Soviet Union would have caught up with the United States in industrial production. ‘By that time, or perhaps even sooner, the Soviet Union will advance to the first place … both in absolute volume of production and production per head.’ 15
If the claim was credible, the implications were awesome. In 1961 Iurii Gagarin orbited the Earth, becoming the world’s first traveller in space. Given the technological competence demonstrated in the Soviet space and nuclear programmes, the economic pre-eminence that Khrushchev forecast implied military pre-eminence, and promised pre-eminent political influence in the world too. Furthermore, the Soviet Union had what the United States lacked: a working model of empire with a directly controlled inner sphere; a sphere of indirect but nonetheless effective control, as in Mongolia, North Korea and Eastern Europe; and, beyond that, a sphere of influence including such diverse states as Cuba, the United Arab Republic, North Vietnam and Ghana. Its arsenal of influence also included channels for cultural, scientific and professional exchange as well as responsive Party organizations round the globe. And in the shorter term, at least, Khrushchev’s claim showed every sign of proving justified. Six years later gross national product of the Soviet Union had increased by nearly 60 per cent and industrial output by 84 per cent. 16
These were heady days for Khrushchev. He participated in an impromptu televised debate with Vice-President Nixon, publicly upbraided President Eisenhower for ordering US spy-planes to overfly the Soviet Union, and put the captured pilot of one which had been shot down on public display. In fact the United States and the Soviet Union were already on the way to convergence. This development, had its costs, however. Mao did not favour rapprochement, and denounced it. This fractured Communist solidarity. It also lost the Soviets their submarine base at Valona on the Adriatic, for Albania sided with China. Distant Beijing seemed preferable to Moscow as a protector of so small and vulnerable a state. Then Kennedy was elected president of the United States and Khrushchev had to face a double standoff with him over Berlin and Cuba.
In Berlin the East German authorities had felt constrained to counter the steady flight of population — including an ever increasing proportion of young, technically trained people — to the We
st. In 1961, in desperation, they had erected a wall between the eastern and western sectors of the city. This action reflected badly on the Soviet Bloc’s image, but the West felt unable to contest it. In the following year Kennedy did contest the movement of Soviet missiles to Cuba, however, and Khrushchev responded by withdrawing them — though not before eliciting an undertaking from Kennedy to remove US missiles from Turkey, which were as uncomfortably close to the Soviet heartlands as Soviet missile sites in Cuba were to the United States. The Cuban missile crisis removed that problem, but the Soviet Union had suffered an unnecessary public humiliation and Khrushchev was soon sacked for ‘adventurism’.
The fact that German forces had come so close to penetrating the Caucasus in 1942—3 had prompted Moscow to order the immediate deportation of over 3 million native people — including Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans and nearly half a million Chechens and Ingush 17 — to less hospitable regions far behind the lines. Their status as suspected traitors led to gratuitous ill-treatment, and barely half the number that were moved out were ever to return. After Stalin’s death, however, the repressive line towards the nationalities eased somewhat. A degree of decentralization was introduced, more Party members belonging to minorities were promoted to posts in central government, and tolerant policies on language and culture were reintroduced. Nevertheless, it was recognized that the ‘national question’ would not disappear as quickly as Marxist theory had suggested and so, while the Chechens, Ingush and Kalmyks deported in 1943 were allowed to return to their former homes with an apology from Khrushchev himself for the ‘abuses’ they had undergone, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks remained unrehabilitated, in exile.
Soviet attempts to manage a multinational, multi-ethnic empire recalled tsarist preoccupations, and the policies followed embraced both old and new methods. The Baltic republics were favoured, as in tsarist times, as a testing ground for innovation, which helped to soothe feelings hurt by their loss of independence in 1939 and their reabsorption into the Soviet Union at the end of the war. However, Central Asia, despite considerable investments to establish cotton-growing, remained backward economically and its peoples largely unacculturated. On the other hand, economic and social development, as well as Soviet policies of positive discrimination, led to previously neglected minorities, including Kazakhs, Buriats, Kabar-dinians and Yakuts, overtaking ethnic Russians in the proportion of their population receiving a higher education.
Some issues, it turned out, were beyond the power of both theory and governmental action to control. There were some unexpected outcomes from deliberate changes, and secular developments were creating changes of their own. Members of minorities, no longer educationally disadvantaged, began to expect more in terms of privilege and status, and became impatient if opportunities were slow to open up to them. 18 From the 1960s the proportion of ethnic Russians in the total Soviet population began to decline rapidly from its high point of almost 55 per cent, and living standards showed less improvement in Russia than among other ethnicities in the periphery. 19
Khrushchev’s boast that the Soviet Union would catch up and even surpass the United States was not to be justified. Yet in the forty years that had passed since the inception of the first Five Year Plan in 1928 immense strides had been taken economically. Gross national product had expanded seven or even eight times over. This represented an average growth rate of 6 to 7 per cent a year - better than that attained during the second period of industrialization under Stolypin. Fixed investment had grown thirty times over, and as much as 30 per cent of the economy was being reinvested in the early 1960s, although productivity was less impressive. 20
Agricultural production increased too, though hardly enough to justify the huge investments that had been poured into it. The acreage under the plough in Kazakhstan more than tripled between 1953 and 1958 yet yields fluctuated wildly year by year. The dairy industry and sheep-rearing there also saw impressive expansion; and the Kazakh economy as a whole, primitive at the outset, came to be well integrated into the Soviet Union’s. 21The output of consumer goods also grew encouragingly, but their quality was poor; and, although the cities saw the erection of vast housing estates, the housing was cramped and shoddy by Western standards. Shostakovich’s hilarious musical Cheriomushki, named after a real Moscow surburban tower-block development, is a monument both to the popular hopes invested in such projects and to the inefficiencies and corruption involved in them. It was taken off after one brief season, and not repeated.
Nevertheless, by the 1970s the population of the Soviet Union was better fed, better housed and enjoyed a higher real standard of living than it had ever done. Contentment spread, especially among the generations old enough to have experienced the privations of the Stalin period, and it extended to the nationalities. At the same time, Communism had wrought great changes in the ethnic map since tsarist days. This was partly a consequence of industrialization and urbanization. In Siberia some of the smaller ethnic groups, like the Khanty (Ostiaks) and Mansi (Voguls), had become outnumbered in their own lands by as much as five to one as ethnic Russians and others poured in to work on various projects. 22 The ethnic and linguistic configuration of many parts of the Soviet Union was altered, sometimes significantly. So it was that Russians came to form almost three-quarters of the population of Karelia, 61 per cent of Buriatia’s and around half of the populations of Yakutia and Tatary
This was the result of migrations, both forced and spontaneous. Aside from the deportations, the government directed labour through job postings and used incentives to tempt workers to places where they were needed. In particular, ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians were encouraged to settle in sensitive strategic areas where the authorities wanted to dilute strong ethnic concentrations of native peoples. In Chechnya-Ingushetia almost a quarter of the population came to be Russian, in Circassia 40 per cent; and substantial Russian-speaking populations were also planted in the Baltic republics and in the frontier areas of Transcaucasia and southern Kazakhstan. 23 Population growth in Russia proper slowed considerably So did that of ethnic Russians. These phenomena may have been related to settlement policies, but they were irrelevant to the policy-makers. They hoped that the population as a whole, but particularly its elites, would develop a distinctive Soviet character, reflecting similar educational standards, sharing the same values, and enjoying the same privileges. A Soviet nationality composed of Party members of all ethnicities and others who took pride in Soviet achievements was indeed being formed, and it suggested a better fate for the Soviet Empire than that of its tsarist predecessor. Yet after a time nationalist sentiments began to grow despite these policies.
The Crimean Tatars, frustrated at their failure to recover the land of their birth, began to organize and eventually delivered a petition signed by most of them. It was rejected, but this did not end their efforts. Jews were also energized, but by Israel, which had developed into a far more attractive ‘national home’ than Birobijan, which Stalin had allotted for the purpose. Thanks to American representations, some 200,000 Jews were allowed to leave for Israel by 1981 24 — a fact which encouraged more Jews and half-Jews, and even non-Jews, to put in applications to migrate, and roused some interest, and resentment, among other sections of the population. The populations of the Baltic provinces were quiescent at this time, as were those of Belarus and Ukraine, though by the later 1960s the KGB had become concerned about underground activity by supporters of the Uniate Church, which had been suppressed after the Second World War but which was believed to be receiving support from Rome. The KGB infiltrated, or suborned, agents in order to monitor the situation. 25 At this stage Soviet security was more concerned about religious than nationalist subversion, but, as events were in due course to demonstrate, the two were connected.
In the satellite countries of Eastern Europe improving living standards became more effective than secret-police activity and repression in maintaining stability through the 1960s and ‘70s. In
Hungary the Kadar regime produced an apparent miracle in the early 1960s, transforming a population seething with resentment after the suppression of the 1956 rising with the offer of a social truce under the slogan ‘Whoever is not against us is with us.’ Collectivization was reintroduced, but more sensitively than on the first occasion, and in a practical rather than doctrinaire fashion. In time, many of the collectives became profitable, set up shops and restaurants in nearby cities, and began to resemble Western-type companies. Traditional industries like food-processing came into their own along with high-technology industries like the manufacture of optical instruments, which were favoured for investment. The ‘black economy’ was partly legalized, workers were encouraged to use factory equipment to make products outside working hours to sell for their personal profit, and moonlighting became common. The economy grew; so did people’s incomes. Television sets and washing machines, which had once been very scarce, became almost commonplace. In East Germany, where a Communist substitute for Hitler’s Volkswagen came into mass production, people were encouraged by the prospect of owning a Trabant car, or a boat to sail on the Baltic, or a cottage by the sea or in the country, the equivalent of the Russian dacha, which had remained its owner’s private property even under Stalin. This was a twentieth-century reflection of Russia’s chronic condition of plentiful space and relatively sparse population, and it applied in some measure to other parts of Eastern Europe too. Bulgarians were less consumer-oriented, but their long-standing reputation as market gardeners was reflected in large collectives specializing in grapes and growing roses for perfume, as well as in vegetables. In Romania the old oppressive peasant economy had disappeared, but the mentalities it had bred remained evident, and many Romanians were still disoriented by the novel experience of city or factory. The Hungarian and German minorities there had long provided the only modernizing leaven, and they suffered most from the transition, for in backward states like Romania the modernizing force of Communism adopted nationalism as its partner.
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