At the same time, the victory brought with it a new order in the Kremlin. Soon after the war, Stalin ordered the People’s Commissariats to be called Ministries, for he announced (in private) that such names had been appropriate to a revolutionary state, but that the Soviet Union had now consolidated itself enough to operate with more permanent institutions. For the first time Stalin and his inner circle began to delegate power to a series of state committees, usually headed by the principal ministers who managed the main areas of the economy. In principle, Stalin was no longer going to monitor all the details of government and economic activity, and some new faces joined the pre-war leadership. Beria and Zhdanov (until his death in 1948) continued on in Stalin’s inner circle, while Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov remained from the pre-war years but were less powerful, especially Voroshilov, disgraced by his military failures. New faces in the top leadership were Malenkov (vice-chairman of the Council of Minsters under Stalin’s chairmanship), Nikolai Bulganin (minister of defense and a longtime economic manager), and Khrushchev, until 1949 head of the Ukrainian party organization and then of the Moscow city party. To a large extent the system did work in a more regular fashion for the last eight years of Stalin’s life, but at the same time he did not refrain from scolding and bullying his closest collaborators and from directing a series of political “cases” with murderous results. The cult of Stalin reached its apogee in the post-war years. Besides the ubiquitous portraits and statues an official adulatory biography appeared on his seventieth birthday. The press produced endless accolades to the “great leader of peoples,” the great Marxist, and the genius military commander Stalin. As much as he may have realized that the USSR needed a more normal mode of government, Stalin could not let go of the reins of power, and continued to behave like a revolutionary commissar of the civil war era, jumping into the middle of the fray with a firing squad ready.
The main task before the Soviet leadership was first of all reconstruction of the war damage, and then the continuation of “socialist construction,” including the progressive technical modernization of industry.
In some ways reconstruction was the easy part, for it meant the rebuilding of previously existing plants and infrastructure, and it was largely completed by 1950. The expansion and modernization of industry was more complicated. It is the case that the growth rates of the post-war era were some of the highest (actual) growth rates in Soviet history. In those years many of the pre-war investments began to pay off, with huge growth in the Urals-Western Siberian metallurgical and mining areas. To a large extent the crucial Soviet industries came up to world standards, and an enormous nuclear industry came into being, at this time largely for military purposes but with planning for power generation and other civilian uses in the future. What did not happen was proportionate investment in consumer goods or agriculture, the latter still hampered by the leadership’s fascination with agronomic fantasies such as the “grass-field” system of crop rotation. Reconstruction brought housing only to the pre-war level, with most people living (at best) in communal apartments. A rare improvement of the post-war years was in medicine, for the number of doctors grew again by seventy-five percent, and the 1946 famine did not lead to massive epidemics, as had occurred in 1932–33.
Stalin’s insistence on centralized discipline and his assumption that all disagreement masked political subversion created a series of incidents among the leadership that terrified even Stalin’s allies. The first sign was Marshal Zhukov’s demotion in 1946 to commander of a local military district. This and later incidents fell in a period of intense ideological campaigning that affected more than just cultural life. The party issued reproofs to composers, poets, and biologists, but it also launched campaigns to celebrate Russian culture and its importance (as well as selected aspects of the non-Russian cultures) as part of a closing-off of Western influence wherever possible. After the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the Soviet authorities suddenly launched a campaign against “cosmopolitanism” that was in fact directed against the many Jews prominent in Soviet culture as well as the state and party apparatus. The campaign soon died down, but not without casualties. The wartime Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was dissolved and its leading members – Yiddish poets, Jewish scientists, and party officials – were arrested and shot. On Stalin’s orders the security forces killed the famous actor and director of the Moscow Yiddish theater, Solomon Mikhoels, in a faked auto accident in Minsk. It is in these years that travel and correspondence abroad became essentially impossible for almost all Soviet citizens. The irony of these campaigns and repressive measures was that the war had for the first time given the Soviet Union legitimacy in the eyes of millions of its people, but rather than relying on that new found legitimacy, the party simply tightened the screws.
Potentially even more serious was the Leningrad affair of 1949. Arising from an arcane dispute over a trade fair held in Leningrad, it soon turned into the dismissal of several thousand party members in the city and the secret trial of nine local party leaders, charged with treasonable offenses. Six were executed and three sent to camps, their real crimes apparently being the creation (in Stalin’s mind) of a sort of local fiefdom that did not consult the central leadership. Another victim was Nikolai Voznesenskii, who had headed Soviet planning since 1938. Peripherally involved in the Leningrad affair, his actual crime seems to have been concealing information from Stalin about the 1949 plan, something the aging dictator would not leave unpunished. Voznesenskii also perished. In 1952 Stalin called a Congress of the Party, the first since 1939, where Georgii Malenkov presented the main report on Soviet achievements, including a wildly inaccurate account of the supposed progress of agriculture. This sort of public spectacle gave an appearance of unity in the party leadership, but in reality Stalin’s behavior was beginning to worry his comrades. In 1951 the Ministry of State Security forces arrested more than a dozen Georgian party officials, charging them with nationalism and spying for the West (the “Mingrelian affair”), resulting in the exile of over ten thousand people from Georgia. Late in 1952 a new “conspiracy” surfaced, in which a supposed plot of Kremlin doctors, most of whom were Jewish, planned to murder Stalin. The horizon was darkening.
In the background of these lurid and sinister events, the party leadership was beginning to realize that some changes were needed. Malenkov and other leaders knew perfectly well that agriculture was not prospering. The collective farms managed to produce enough to feed the people at a sufficient but low level. Every harvest was still a gamble, and meat and dairy products came overwhelmingly from the collective farmers’ private plots. Another area of crisis was the GULAG. By 1950 the special settlements had two and a half million people, most of them from various national minorities deported for unreliability: Germans, North Caucasian peoples, Crimean Tatars, as well as some remaining kulaks. The camp system had about the same number, in this case heavily Russian, including political prisoners from the 1930s, Nazi collaborators real and mythical, and a great majority of people convicted of non-political crimes and common murderers and thieves. For the GULAG administration the problem was that prison labor was no longer economically effective. Though prisoners made up some ten percent of the work force in logging and construction and were used in projects where ordinary labor seemed too expensive, the costs of the GULAG were too great. The expenditures on administration and hundreds of thousands of guards were just too high, and to make matters worse, the prison labor system rested on unskilled labor. Even in logging, mechanization was beginning to penetrate Soviet industry, and prison laborers lacked the skills and motivation to use the new equipment. By 1952 the GULAG officials and Beria himself were considering some sort of changes in the system.
Then Stalin died at his dacha on March 5, 1953. The response of Stalin’s inner circle was to declare collective leadership, with Khrushchev (now made first secretary of the party) and Malenkov (now made chair of the Council of Ministers) as the main figures. The immediate pr
oblem they faced was Beria. Since 1946 Beria had not headed the security police, the Ministry of State Security or the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but he did have Stalin’s ear. He was also head of the Special Committee within the defense network that ran the increasingly important nuclear industry, at that time still almost entirely working for military production. In the new division of power after Stalin’s death Beria obtained the united Ministry of Internal Affairs and State Security. Once again, as in 1938, he was in charge of all police functions. The first political crisis of the new regime came at the end of June, when Malenkov raised the issue of Beria at the Presidium of the party (the new name for the Politburo). The meeting on June 26 was actually a conspiracy, for Beria was not told that his fate was on the agenda. Right in the meeting Marshal Zhukov and a group of officers arrested him. A week later Malenkov and Khrushchev explained their actions to the Central Committee, claiming that Beria was trying to control the party through the security police and was aiming for absolute power. He was an intriguer who had poisoned Stalin’s mind against the other leaders and ultimately was an agent of Western imperialism. He was presenting himself as a reformer to create a political base in the party. After a closed trial, Beria was executed in a military bunker by the Moscow River.
The removal of Beria solved only one problem. Even before his arrest the new leadership knew that some changes had to take place. Agriculture was in poor shape, the camp system was in crisis, and ferment in eastern Germany was creating a problem in Eastern Europe. Khrushchev sponsored a series of agricultural reforms, higher purchase prices for kolhoz products and lower taxes on the peasants’ private plots. After Stalin’s death Khrushchev had acquired the position of first secretary of the Communist Party, but Malenkov was the prime minister and Molotov still a powerful minister of foreign affairs. Both sat on the Presidium of the party and all of its members, with Khrushchev leading the chorus, proclaimed that the party and country now had collective leadership. To carry out his plans, however, Khrushchev needed to eliminate potential rivals. First he managed to convince his colleagues to demote Malenkov from the position of prime minister to minister of electrification and replace him with Bulganin. He then moved to sideline Molotov, though the latter remained foreign minister. By the time of the 1955 Geneva Conference it was clear that Khrushchev was the most powerful, not Bulganin or Molotov.
While these maneuvers in the Kremlin were bringing Khrushchev to the top, the leader was carrying on in secret a complete revision of the Stalin era policies of repression. The news of Stalin’s death and the first reforms provoked revolts in the GULAG in 1953 and 1954 that were put down by the military, but the process of release began, from the camps and labor colonies as well as from the special settlements. Almost a million were released by the beginning of 1955. Equally important were the various investigations that the authorities launched under the aegis of the USSR Supreme Court to examine the more egregious cases of execution and imprisonment back to the 1930s. Their findings were overwhelmingly that in the cases of these victims they found “an absence of the components of a crime” (otsutstvie sostava prestupleniia), leading to their release and the posthumous rehabilitation of the dead. Rehabilitation was not merely symbolic, for it meant that the families of those who perished were no longer enemies of the state, and if they had languished in the camps, they were released. All over the Soviet Union hundreds of thousands of people found themselves with a ticket home and papers allowing them to live normal lives, returning to families some had not seen for fifteen or more years, and whose families did not even know if they were alive. For the time being, the release and rehabilitation of the prisoners and the dead took place in silence. Nothing appeared in the newspapers.
At the end of 1955 Khrushchev convinced his colleagues, even those who had been Stalin’s closest associates like Molotov and Kaganovich, to establish a party commission to look into Stalin’s “violations of socialist legality,” particularly the extermination of most of the party elite in 1937–38. The head of the commission was P. N. Pospelov, a former editor of Pravda and to all appearances a fervent Stalinist. His commission’s report became the basis of Khrushchev’s famous “secret speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in February 1956. Khrushchev’s speech, with additions from himself and editorial work by another party ideologist, M. M. Suslov, came at the end of the Congress. As everyone was packing to go home, the announcement came to the Soviet and foreign Communists that there would an additional session. There, Khrushchev read his speech for four hours (with a short break) to a stunned and silent audience. In it he blamed all the crimes of the 1930s and after on Stalin personally, with some room for Beria. He focused primarily on the destruction of the Central Committee in 1937–38, seventy percent of whose members had perished, and on Stalin’s conduct of the war. Neither of his accounts was fully honest, for in blaming Stalin for the terror he omitted the role of Molotov and other leaders, including himself, to say nothing of the thousands of enthusiastic denouncers of wreckers and spies from among the population. Khrushchev’s account of Stalin’s role in the war was simply wrong, giving rise to numerous legends that came to be refuted only after 1991. He said almost nothing about collectivization, which ultimately involved more people and more deaths than the terror. The point, however, was to shift the blame onto Stalin for all the crimes of the past and to underscore the importance of the collective leadership of the party, to avoid “the cult of personality” that surrounded Stalin in his lifetime. To prevent a recurrence of such horrors, the need was for collective leadership and the preservation of “socialist legality.”
The leadership had debated how much to publicize the speech, and the result was a compromise. It was not published in the Soviet Union (it appeared only in 1989) but was circulated among party organizations where it was read in its entirety to party members, some seven million people, and the whole of the Komsomol, more than eighteen million. As it was also circulated to foreign Communists, the speech got to the West through Poland and was quickly printed in many translations. Khrushchev’s lurid depictions of torture and execution (taken directly from Pospelov’s report) were a tremendous shock to foreign leftists, especially in the West, but elsewhere reaction was mixed. In China Mao Tse-tung never really approved of it, and Stalin’s works remained canonical in the Chinese party. In the Soviet Union itself the report produced pro-Stalin riots by thousands of students in Tbilisi and Gori in Stalin’s native Georgia, and it caused outbursts of violent criticism of the regime among Moscow intellectuals. Mostly, however, the population was more concerned with meat prices and accepted the new policies, even if many harbored more positive views of the Soviet past than those now propagated by Khrushchev.
The main effects of the secret speech were in Eastern Europe, leading to riots in Poland and the Hungarian revolution in the fall of 1956. Khrushchev survived these threats with his power intact, and moved on with more reform projects. In the late 1950s the release of prisoners and special settlers grew to a flood. The deported nationalities from the North Caucasus returned home, their autonomous republics restored. (Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, and some other groups, however, did not return, though their personal legal statuses were restored.) By 1960 the GULAG had come to an end. More change was in the works. Soviet industry was doing much better than agriculture, but the pressure to build a fully modern society, now in competition with the United States, mandated greater progress in both manufacturing and agriculture. Khrushchev publicly called on Soviet agriculture to surpass US production in meat and milk products. For industry the solution he adopted early in 1957 was to decentralize the economy, creating “Councils of the National Economy” on the regional level instead of the central industrial ministries that had managed the economy since the 1930s.
Before this plan could be implemented, a new crisis arose, this time in the central leadership of the party. Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich had been discontented with Khrushchev for some time. Molotov was unhappy
with the partial reconciliation with Tito, the increasing talk of peaceful coexistence with the West, and with the increased priority given to agriculture and consumer goods. His allies shared these doubts, and also opposed the growing personal power of Khrushchev. Behind these particular concerns was the looming issue of de-Stalinization: how far would Khrushchev go? The lesson of Hungary was that the process could get out of hand, and even without that, as the main survivors of Stalin’s old guard they were themselves acutely vulnerable. In the early months of 1957 they lobbied the members of the Presidium, gaining seven votes – themselves, the aging Voroshilov, Bulganin, and two important economic managers – out of eleven for ousting Khrushchev from power. The plotters then told Khrushchev that they needed to meet to discuss a joint appearance in Leningrad for its anniversary, but when he arrived on June 18, he learned that they wanted to replace him as the leader of the party. Furious debate raged and Mikoyan, alone of the Stalin old guard in support of Khrushchev, left the room briefly and went to Leonid Brezhnev and Elena Furtseva (the only woman ever to play a role in Soviet leadership), both candidate members of the Presidium. He told them to contact the Minister of Defense and a candidate member of the Presidium, Marshal Zhukov, who was absent because the plotters had sent him off on maneuvers. Brezhnev raced to the telephone and summoned the Marshal, who arrived in the Kremlin while the debate still raged. Molotov had his seven votes, but all but one of the candidate members stuck by Khrushchev. Mikoyan and others had also contacted the Central Committee members resident in and near Moscow, and by the party statute the ultimate arbiter of such decisions was the Central Committee (CC). Molotov and the others at first refused to meet with the CC members, but soon realized that they had no choice, especially with Zhukov unwavering in opposition to their plans. He had been the man who had arrested Beria and had the loyalty of the armed forces. The full Central Committee convened on June 22, 1957, the sixteenth anniversary of Hitler’s invasion.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 47