And soon it began to be clear that it would be a very new pattern indeed. We do not know now, we may never know, precisely what Stalin intended. All we know is that in breaking up the old pattern, in reducing the value of every single member of the supreme Party bodies, in bringing comparative outsiders so suddenly into the centre, Stalin was taking the first step towards the physical extermination of the majority of his oldest and most faithful supporters. Andreyev was completely dropped from the new Presidium. Beria was already weakened by the blood purges which had been organised to destroy his own apparatus in Georgia and elsewhere. On 13th January, three months after the Party Congress, the public action started with the announcement to a fascinated world, to an appalled and terror-struck Russia, that the organs of State Security had uncovered a plot by “a terrorist group of physicians,” nine in all, seven of them Jews, who, working hand in hand with Zionist organisations and the American secret service, had successfully murdered Zhdanov and Shcherbakov (before his death during the war considered, with Zhdanov, as being a likely successor to Stalin) and tried to murder a number of Army leaders, including the distinguished marshals, Vassilievsky, Govorov and Koniev. The doctors had all been leading specialists retained to care for the Party leadership. According to Khrushchev, three years later, one had been put in chains on Stalin’s personal instructions. All had been beaten to make them confess.7
Before this action there had been a plenum of the Central Committee, of which the world knew nothing, at which Stalin had spoken, and in vague terms threatened Molotov and Mikoyan. At the same time, also according to Khrushchev, he had “toyed with the idea” that his old drinking companion, one time commander-in-chief of the Red Army, Voroshilov, had been an English agent: “It’s true—an English agent! A special tapping device was installed in his home to listen to what was said there.”8
Again: “It is not excluded that had Stalin remained at the helm for several months more, Comrades Molotov and Mikoyan would probaly not have delivered any speeches at this Congress.
“Stalin evidently had plans to finish off the old members of the Politburo.” Beria and Kaganovich would certainly have gone too. Perhaps others. Malenkov himself was clearly operating at this time hand in glove with Beria. But the only certain thing is that Stalin, whether because he had finally gone off his head, or whether he justly feared a conspiracy against him among his oldest colleagues, was preparing, in an atmosphere of terror (the newspapers and radio were shrieking “Vigilance! Beware spies!” at the top of their voices for weeks on end), to break the old pattern finally by judicial murder and to substitute a new subordinate hierarchy to carry out his will. Fearful things were going on behind the scenes, as the “trial” of the doctors was prepared by the extraction of confessions under torture and the arrest and liquidation of unknown thousands. On 17th February Izvestia announced the sudden death of the chief of Kremlin Security, Major-General Kosynkin. On 3rd March it was announced that Stalin himself was critically ill. His death was announced at 6 a.m. on 6th March.
Muscovites awoke to find the city completely sealed off by Beria’s MVD troops with tanks and flame-throwers. During the night Stalin’s personal aide, General Poskrebychev, disappeared and was never heard of again. The commander of Moscow Military District and the commandants of the Moscow City Garrison and of the Kremlin guards, were put under arrest. Early in the morning Stalin’s heirs, crowded together in the Kremlin behind Beria’s guards, issued their communiqué with the hysterical appeal that there should be “no panic and disarray.”9 By the time the day was over these men had announced the succession and shattered at a blow the hierarchy so carefully established by their late master only three months earlier. Five members of the Secretariat were sacked. The thirty-six man Presidium was brought down to fourteen. Government Ministries were reduced from fifty-two to twenty-five. A compact new body faced the future, with Malenkov as Prime Minister over four First Deputy Prime Ministers (Beria, Molotov, Bulganin and Kaganovich). To please the Army, Marshal Zhukov was brought back from the limbo to which Stalin had consigned him (for being too popular) and installed as joint Deputy Minister of Defence, under Bulganin, with Marshal Vassilievsky. The new Secretariat consisted of Malenkov, Khrushchev, Suslov, Pospelov, Shatalin and Ignatiev —in that order. Two of the men who had been exalted by Stalin, one of them a Khrushchev man, the other not, and now cast out by Malenkov, were Brezhnev and Kosygin, who were later to come back more strongly than before.
Taking all these circumstances together, it is not surprising that many Russians still believe that Stalin was murdered, and that Malenkov and Beria, perhaps others, but not Khrushchev for obvious reasons, had a hand in it. When tyrants die in Russia, especially on the eve of a new outbreak of atrocity, people’s minds naturally turn to murder as the most likely explanation. Stalin was a murderer. Trotsky, a Russian, accused him of poisoning Lenin, as the most natural thing in the world. Stalin’s closest colleagues were soon to murder Beria, when he had ceased to be useful to them. We do not know. If Stalin died a natural death, then Providence was very kind to certain of his successors.
Khrushchev now, and for some time afterwards, played a waiting game. He took no public initiative. He was well inside the inner circle as it presented itself to the waiting world. He was a member of the new Presidium, which, like the new Secretariat, had a definite order of seniority—Malenkov, Beria, Molotov, Voroshilov, Khrushchev, Bulganin, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Saburov, Pervukhin. Beria had moved up to number two, still hand in glove with Malenkov (his troops had been essential for the execution of the coup—there is no other word for the destruction of Stalin’s Presidium). Saburov and Pervukhin, technocrats first, were Malenkov’s own protégés. All Khrushchev’s protégés had gone, but not all his friends. And he was still powerful in the reduced Secretariat. The council of Ministers was packed with Malenkov men, and it was at once clear that Malenkov had decided to repose his main strength on the State Government, which ran the production Ministries, the executive, consisting largely of the most able and often a-political individuals, as opposed to the Party. It looked quite a good idea. Russia was going to move away from repression by the Party bureaucracy and into the technological age, in which administrative and executive brains would at last begin to count. Khrushchev had no foot in this camp, but as second Party Secretary after Malenkov he shared control over an immense and still indispensable machine which, if he handled it well, he could transform.
He handled things very well indeed. In the days of confusion immediately after Stalin’s death he did not put himself forward. He was honoured by being given charge of Stalin’s funeral arrangements. But he kept in the background. He did not speak at the funeral. Malenkov, Beria and Molotov spoke. The only one of these three to show any human warmth was Molotov who, though he had been Stalin’s butt, had also been, very largely, Stalin’s creator and must in his queer way have loved the atrocious old man and regarded with misgiving and contempt the pushings and the public posturings of his new superiors.
The Malenkov régime started off with some spirit. Malenkov had succeeded to both Stalin’s positions: the Premiership and the First Secretaryship of the Party. There was no pretence about a collective leadership. He set out at once to establish his position as the true heir, the supreme leader. But within ten days all that had changed. Malenkov did not operate in a vacuum. He depended, for the time being at least, very much on the old stagers who surrounded him. And these old stagers were very certain in their minds that there was to be no successor to Stalin, no supreme boss, no second Stalin with the power of life and death over each and every one of them. They would play their parts and accept the seniority of a much younger man, presentable and outstandingly able, provided he was content to appear as first among equals, as chairman, in effect, of a committee, a collective. Otherwise they would not co-operate. And so they acted, and although Khrushchev kept in the shadows he was central to their action. There was to be a meeting of the Supreme Soviet, the constitutional rubb
er-stamp, on 14th March, at which the new order was to be proclaimed. But, at the last minute, the meeting was postponed. Instead the Party Central Committee was convened to hold a plenary session, and at this session Malenkov rose to say that because of his responsibilities as Prime Minister he wished to be relieved of his post as First Secretary of the Communist Party. His resignation was accepted, but no successor was announced. The Secretariat now consisted of five members instead of six, but Khrushchev was listed first. With him was still Ignatiev, who, as Minister of State Security, had been so active purging Beria’s men. There was no need, as far as Khrushchev was concerned, for a formal title. He had the Secretariat in his pocket, therefore the Party, for what it was worth. He could pack the Party at will. And he was now the only man to have a seat on both the Presidium and the Secretariat. Malenkov, cut off from the Party apparatus, had to rely more than ever on his government machine—and on members of that machine introduced into the Presidium.
For a long time Khrushchev held back. He left the running to Malenkov, and it was Malenkov who appeared, whether as the friend and colleague of Mao Tse-tung, whether as the man who was quietly undermining Stalin’s reputation, whether as the initiator of new approaches to the West or of a relaxation of the tyranny at home. For a long time Khrushchev did not have a word to say. He worked away behind the scenes, purging the Party of Malenkov supporters, rejuvenating it in his own way by quietly inserting his own men, his “Ukrainians” above all, into key positions all over the land—not without opposition, not without great circumspection.
This went on all through the summer of 1953, while controls were loosened, writers and intellectuals, long silent, began to raise their voices, and Stalin, though never criticised, was quietly relegated to the background. In July the appearance of a fraternally united collective was shattered by the sudden arrest of Beria and his murder, long before his execution was officially announced. We do not know whether Malenkov joined with the comrades in liquidating Beria, or whether Beria’s removal was part of a growing movement against Malenkov. We do not even know the circumstances of his death. Khrushchev told so many stories, some of them grisly, all of them revealing a bland failure to understand that foreigners might see something odd in members of a cabinet getting together to seize one of their colleagues, however dangerous, however evil, however overbearing, and shoot him on the spot, without impeachment, without trial—so many stories to so many different groups of foreign Communists, that they are not worth paying attention to. All that mattered was that Khrushchev and many others benefited from the murder of Beria, so richly deserved: Malenkov did not.
It was in August that Khrushchev struck his first really damaging blow, though still with public discretion. He felt strong enough to sack the Secretary of the Armenian Communist Party, Arutinov, the man who had dared make the first attack on his agricultural schemes. This could not have been done without the agreement of Mikoyan, who all through the Stalin terror had cherished his own native republic and seen that at least in Erevan the people did not starve. In September Khrushchev came out into the open. It was announced that he had assumed the formal title of First Secretary of the Party. And his first act was the seizure of Leningrad by the sacking of Malenkov’s most favoured protégé, who himself had succeeded Zhdanov, Andrianov. But Malenkov was still strong enough for some time to make the Government, as opposed to the Party, appear as the senior organ in the promulgation of all decrees. It was a queer situation. All over Russia philosophers, scientists of every kind, artists of every kind were rising, and being encouraged to rise, in revolt against the dead hand of Party obscurantists. All over the country all kinds of workers, from engineers to peasants, were being wooed with concessions of all kinds. And all those who were fighting for more freedom saw Malenkov as their hope. The Party Press, controlled now by Khrushchev, hit back. In those days of conflict with Malenkov Khrushchev was unable to appear as a liberaliser. Malenkov was making the running here, and he could not be outbid. All Khrushchev could do was exalt the claims of a Party which was being purified and returned to Leninist ways. The purification meant the substitution of Khrushchev supporters for Malenkov supporters; the return to Leninist ways was intended as encouragement to all those revolted by the behaviour of the Party hitherto and all those who were inclined to see in Malenkov’s concessions a too glib opportunism—and all those, inside the Party, who feared the Party’s eclipse by Malenkov’s State apparatus. Khrushchev had to go very carefully indeed. For the time being, in order to assert himself against Malenkov, he had to follow the unpopular course—the hard line at home and abroad. Especially at home.
In August Malenkov had formally presented his New Course of amelioration and reform. It was announced in a way unprecedented to the Supreme Soviet without previous reference to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. It concentrated on the rapid development of “the light and food industries at the same rate as heavy industry,” thus marking a dramatic and ardently desired break with the twenty-five year old concentration on heavy industry at all costs. Hand in hand with this went cuts in taxes and prices designed to rally the masses of workers and peasants. This was Malenkov’s supreme bid. Since it was a direct appeal, over the heads of the Party, to the people, it should have succeeded. It failed. Khrushchev was now strong enough not only to know that he had the backing of the Party as a whole, but also the backing of his colleagues in the Presidium and the Secretariat, the Army too; some saw Malenkov acting the demagogue in a bid for supreme power, which they were prepared to concede to nobody; others were more concerned with his deliberate attempt to undermine the authority of the Party, which included them; others genuinely believed that the Soviet Union could not afford more relaxation, could not afford to “raise sharply in two or three years the population’s supply of foodstuffs and manufactured goods, meat and meat-products, fish and fish-products, butter, sugar, eggs, confectionery, textiles, clothes, footwear, crockery, furniture and other cultural and household goods.”10 To this level had the pretender to leadership of 200,000,000 people in the world’s most advanced society been reduced in his appeal for confidence.
Khrushchev knew as well as anybody else that Malenkov was right in principle: if Russia was not to stagnate, Party and Government must, in the quickest possible time, raise the abysmal standard of living and give the intelligent and enterprising their heads—always within limits. But this was to be done not by Malenkov, but by Khrushchev himself. How to cut the ground from under the feet of the man who was making the running?
He began with his first major speech in September 1953, and that speech was about agriculture.11 Malenkov had said earlier that Soviet agriculture had turned the corner, was running on the right lines, and could supply what was needed. Khrushchev had another story, much nearer the truth. There was enough bread, he said, and there would be no shortage of bread grains. But there were intolerable shortages of everything else. For the first time the facts about agricultural production long known to Western experts, long concealed behind bogus statistics, were officially admitted to Russia and the world. As an example, not only were there 3.5 million fewer cattle than there had been on the eve of the war, and 8.9 million head fewer than there had been in 1928, twenty-five years earlier, on the eve of the collectivisation, but there had also been a drop of 2.1 million head of all livestock during 1952—this, of course, was Stalin’s last year, when Khrushchev had retired from the agricultural scene. All the same, although he gave a fairly hopeless picture, admitting failures which had never been admitted before, and although he put the catastrophic and scandalous state of Russian food production in perspective for the first time since it had collapsed in 1929, Khrushchev had only exhortations to offer. At no point in his speech did he so much as begin to hint at the true reasons for the continued failure—the system itself. And the impact of even what he did say was weakened by the wildly optimistic light in which he projected the future. The chief aim of this speech, seen in retrospect (this was not evident to o
utsiders at the time) was twofold: to suggest that Malenkov in his earlier assessments of the situation had displayed complacency amounting to frivolity, and to paint the past and the present in the gloomiest terms so that any further improvement would be attributed to him, Khrushchev, personally. At that moment of time the world had no idea that Khrushchev was preparing to identify himself with Soviet agriculture and to stake his reputation on a dramatic improvement. But he had a plan, and this plan was to bring him into the limelight and keep him there.
The plan had nothing to do with the quiet encouragement of the peasants to pull their weight by the judicious use of incentives, as proposed by Malenkov; still less had it anything to do with a radical reassessment of the system. The former was too slow, the latter too revolutionary. In effect, Khrushchev decided that for the time being the old-established collectives must be written off as a theatre of swift improvement. Instead there was to be a complete and dramatic switch. The whole weight of agricultural investment, such as it was, was to be concentrated behind the opening up of an area, much of which had never been cultivated before—the so-called Virgin Lands of Kazakhstan and south-western Siberia.
The scheme was launched, and by Khrushchev personally, in February 1954, at the end of a special emergency conference of agricultural experts in Moscow. The purpose of the conference was to emphasise that Soviet food production was in even worse case than Khrushchev had said five months earlier, and to show that nobody could offer a convincing solution of the problem. Nobody except Khrushchev. Khrushchev’s solution was simplicity itself—and at the same time spectacular and gigantic and sudden in the beloved Russian tradition. Nothing had been done for twenty-five years: now everything was to be done at once. The stored fertility of vast areas of untilled steppe, immemorial grazing grounds for nomad cattle, was to be tapped and exploited in a colossal operation which could not fail. During 1954 over six million acres of this land were to be ploughed up, sown down to spring wheat, and harvested. By the end of 1955 this total was to be brought up to 32 million acres. One hundred and twenty thousand tractors were to be engaged in this operation. Two hundred and fifty thousand “volunteers,” mainly from the Komsomol, were to be transported to these vast empty spaces, where there were no houses, no farm buildings, no public services, to build themselves first primitive huts, then new villages and towns as they worked. The acreage involved is hard to visualise. Thirty-two million acres was more than three times the acreage under cultivation in the whole of the Soviet Union on the eve of the collectivisation. It was equal to the combined cultivated area of Britain, France and Spain.
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