Zhukov's reputation saved him. Boastful though he was, he was a figure with enormous prestige both inside and outside the country. Perhaps Stalin, too, had a fondness for Zhukov sufficient to rescue him from death. His downfall was planned with the usual care. One night in April 1946 the head of the Soviet air force, Marshal Aleksandr Novikov, the saviour of Soviet air power during the war, answered the knock on the door to find KGB agents waiting. He was driven away to a vicious interrogation. Stripped, forced like the repatriated Soviet prisoners of war to don a tattered shirt and trousers, he was tortured into confessing his part in sabotaging Soviet aircraft production (a charge even more preposterous than a Zhukov coup). Along the way he incriminated other officers, including Zhukov. Seventy more officers were arrested and interrogated to fill out the accusations. One day in June Zhukov was summoned to appear before the Main Military Council. That same night security men came to search his dacha but were turned away by its angry owner. Some days later another group of security police came with an armed guard and searched Zhukov's Moscow apartment looking for valuables allegedly looted from Germany. They took almost everything, including his daughter's doll.
At the meeting of the Council, attended by the Politburo and leading military commanders, Stalin ordered a letter to be read out in which Zhukov was accused of hostility to the Central Committee and the Government. The generals present, except for one, then spoke up in Zhukov's defence. The members of the Politburo all condemned him as a Bonapartist threat to the state. When Zhukov, who sat throughout with a bowed head, was given the floor he rejected the allegations, swore his loyalty to Communism, and agreed that he had out of conceit exaggerated his contribution to victory. The atmosphere of the meeting became tense. It would have been characteristic of Stalin to endorse the accusations, even perhaps to have accepted their truth. Yet according to one recollection Stalin told Zhukov privately that he did not for a moment believe the allegations, but that it would be better for him to leave Moscow for a while. Despite the hostility of the politicians present at the council meeting, Stalin offered Zhukov what amounted to internal exile. He was posted off to be commander of the Odessa Military District; later he was posted to a more obscure command in the Urals.30
Zhukov's name disappeared from the press. Stalin became the architect of victory. A film was made on the fall of Berlin which pressed home the message to the point of absurdity. With no staff and no generals, Stalin was pictured attended only by his loyal secretary, directing the great battle. The Soviet system was long practised in the art of writing people out of history. The two standard textbooks on the Second World War, prepared for senior school pupils in 1956, mentioned Zhukov's name only three times (and then in passing), as commander of the Western Front before Moscow and of the First Belorussian Front at Berlin.31 Other military stars shared the same fate. Chief of Staff Antonov was exiled even further than Zhukov, to command of the Transcaucasian Military District. The names of Rokossovsky, Voronov, Konev, Vatutin and a host of others vanished from the public's eye. The unlucky ones suffered more than Zhukov. Between 1946 and 1948 senior commanders were executed or imprisoned on trumped-up treason charges. The NKGB continued to pursue the case of the disgraced Zhukov. When General Vladimir Kryukov was interrogated in 1948 on charges of looting luxuries from Germany, he was asked: ‘Can you repeat hostile remarks made by Zhukov about the Party or the Government?’32 Despite the accumulation of further extorted evidence, Zhukov survived, in exile, without further threat. In 1953 he was rehabilitated, but at the end of 1957 was pensioned off by Khrushchev on the grounds once again of excessive self-glorification. History has been a kinder judge.
Stalin turned next to the heroes of Leningrad. The second city of Russia had suffered and overcome the horrors of modern siege warfare. Its defenders were hailed as model Communists. After the war Leningrad threatened to eclipse Moscow, as it had done under Kirov in the early 1930s. Writers, artists and poets established a flourishing and independent cultural life. The city was run by young and enterprising Communists who enjoyed the powerful patronage of Andrei Zhdanov, the former Leningrad Party leader, who in the immediate post-war years became the most influential figure in domestic politics behind Stalin. When Zhdanov died of heart failure in 1948 the Soviet apparatus contained a great many Leningraders, two of whom, Nikolai Voznesensky and Alexander Kuznetsov, were widely tipped as Stalin's successors. Voznesensky had risen, like Zhukov, to giddy heights during the war. He was responsible for planning the Soviet war economy, whose remarkable revival after 1942 played a critical part in the very survival of the state. After the war he began to write a major theoretical outline of the political economy of Communism, a successor to the economic thoughts of Comrade Stalin. By 1948 he was second only to Stalin in the Council of Ministers. Kuznetsov was one of the leaders of the Leningrad siege; like Kirov he was good-looking, energetic, a hard and responsible worker loyal to the Communist ideal. He was second only to Stalin in the Party hierarchy. Their success and popularity, like Zhukov's, was enough to place them in danger, not only from Stalin, but from other contestants in the succession.
During 1949 those rivals, spurred on by Stalin, began a new wave of purges, which were aimed first at Leningrad. On the pretext that the local Party committee was trying to fix elections, Stalin sent Georgi Malenkov, a narrow and ambitious Stalinist, to investigate. It is significant that the Museum of the Defence of Leningrad was closed down, its director arrested and its holdings confiscated. Lest the memory of Leningrad's heroism linger on, wartime newspapers were removed from public access in libraries. Beria and Abakumov supplied the evidence needed to incriminate Kuznetsov and Voznesensky and almost the whole of the Leningrad Party organization. They were all arrested and accused of a catalogue of invented crimes, from espionage for Britain to corruption and debauchery. The show trial was staged in September 1950. Uncharacteristically, and despite repeated beatings, neither Kuznetsov nor Voznesensky was prepared to admit in court to the trumped-up charges. The leading defendants were all found guilty, including Voznesensky's brother, the rector of Leningrad University, and his sister Maria. As the sentences were read KGB men wrapped the prisoners in white shrouds, and carried them bodily from the courtroom; they were shot within the hour (though according to one account Voznesensky was allowed to live another three months before dying in a truck on the way to Moscow). With these deaths, and Zhukov's exile, Stalin was rid of the war's most successful offspring.33
No one was free from the fog of suspicion and fear in which Moscow was permanently enveloped. Other wartime leaders were obscured by it. Molotov was sacked as Foreign Minister in 1949; Beria was relieved of his position as head of the NKVD in 1946 and replaced by Sergei Kruglov. Both men remained on the Politburo, but now they relied on Stalin's caprice rather than a power base of their own. In the late 1940s Stalin resurrected the atmosphere of the earlier terror. Peasants were punished for growing rich during the war, though few had. They were forced to meet impossible quotas, which left many on the edge of starvation. Workers were subjected to harsh discipline, long hours and the supervision of the NKVD. Intellectuals were the target of a renewed wave of cultural conformism. With the Leningrad trial the Party itself was opened again to the threat of the purge . The Gulag population began to swell. Between 1944 and 1950 the number of prisoners grew from 1.1 million to more than 2.5 million. Together with deportees, prisoners of war and other categories of slave labourers the overall number of victims may have been as high as 10 million.34
During the last, bleak, spiritless years of the dictatorship the regime singled out Soviet Jews as special victims. Their persecution was undertaken in the full knowledge of what had happened to European Jewry under the German occupation. Soviet anti-Semitism flourished unofficially even during the war. It differed from the genocidal imperative of German anti-Semitism only by degree. It was inspired to some extent by traditions of anti-Semitism which re-emerged in the Baltic states, Belorussia and the Ukraine in the wake of German racism.
Jews were discriminated against in the armed forces, heir to another anti-Semitic tradition. They were decorated less frequently; they were turned away by some units; their role as partisans was played down by the propaganda apparatus. The word ‘Yid' was heard more frequently, although it had been banned after the Revolution. When Jewish refugees and veterans returned home they not only discovered the stark truth about the genocide (only one Jew could be found alive in Kiev when it was liberated in 1943), but found themselves victimized in turn by local populations, which had helped themselves to Jewish possessions, or by local officials hostile to Jewish demands for relief and rehousing.35 The most crushing blow came with the persistent refusal of the regime to recognize that the German race war had been directed at the Jewish people as such. No references were made to the genocide; officials rebuked those who exaggerated ‘Jewish martyrdom’ or indulged in ‘national egotism’. The report produced in Kiev on Babi Yar talked of the death of ‘peaceful Soviet citizens’, not of Jews. Jewish efforts to publish a Black Book of anti-Jewish atrocities ended with a blank refusal.36 Anti-Semitism was sharpened in 1947 with the start of a new public scare directed at ‘cosmopolitanism’. The campaign began as a search for scapegoats in the Cold War confrontation with American imperialism. To be cosmopolitan was to be disloyal to the Soviet ideal; it was to be a spy for the capitalist enemy; it was to be the rootless tool of warmongers and chauvinists. While Senator Joseph McCarthy sniffed out America's fifth column of godless Communists, Stalin's policemen invented an insidious conspiracy by bourgeois nationalists and deviationists, paid for in dollars. The Jewish community, because of their contacts with Jews in the United States during the war and the flow of Jewish aid from abroad, were already suspect. Stalin's habitual distrust of national feeling, even one revived in the face of the Holocaust, sealed the fate of Soviet Jews.
The first victims were those Jewish intellectuals who had set up the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during the war. Their chief spokesman was Solomon Mikhoels, a playwright with an international reputation. At Stalin's instigation he was lured to Minsk to discuss a Belorussian play. On 12 January 1948 he was telephoned at his hotel and left in a car. He was driven to the dacha of a local Party boss, Lavrenti Tsanava, where he was murdered. His body was dumped by the roadside near the hotel, where it was to be run over by a truck to simulate the accident later given as the official cause of death. He was a popular figure, and Stalin moved cautiously. Further official investigation produced the implausible conclusion that Mikhoels was murdered by the American Secret Service to prevent his exposure of an American spy ring.37
Over the following months prominent Jews were sacked or arrested. In October there was a spontaneous demonstration by an estimated 50,000 Soviet Jews outside the Moscow synagogue when the representative of the new state of Israel (and its future Prime Minister), Golda Meir, attended the celebration of Yom Kippur. Stalin was startled by the strength of Jewish feeling and uncertain about what to do. I can't swallow them, I can't spit them out,’ he is reported to have said. ‘They are the only group that is completely unassimilable.’38 The idea of a Jewish homeland in Birobidzhan on the Pacific coast had been revived after the war, but few settlers arrived there. There is evidence that Stalin thought about another mass deportation. In the end he opted for terror. In November 1948 the activities of the Anti-Fascist Committee were abruptly halted. Its leaders were arrested and another major show trial was prepared. Yiddish schools were closed down; all Jewish literature and newspapers were banned; printer's type in Yiddish was broken up; Jewish libraries were closed and bookshops purged of offending Jewish literature. The cultural and religious life of Soviet Jews was rooted out, and Jewish writers and artists were imprisoned, banished or executed.
The anti-Semitism touched all areas of Jewish existence. Jews were thrown out of high schools and universities; they were removed from any positions of responsibility in the economy or the bureaucratic apparatus. They were denied the right to travel abroad. The anti-Semitic wave was applied with such a remorseless consistency that a number of notorious Jewish interrogators in the Lubyanka, who had played the sadist there for more than a decade, were themselves transferred or liquidated in 1951. The hundreds of Jews awaiting trial were not lacking new jailers or torturers. In their interrogation the current priorities of the regime were revealed. They were accused of Zionist conspiracy, of bourgeois chauvinism, of spying for the West; some, bizarrely, were accused of slandering the Soviet state by suggesting that it was anti-Semitic. Trials began in 1951 and continued up to the time of Stalin's death in March 1953. The main trial of the members of the Anti-Fascist Committee took place in July 1951; only one of the defendants survived the batterings, verbal and physical, with the courage to denounce his persecutors and judges rather than his fellows. All save an elderly doctor, Lina Shtern, were handed the death sentence. Shtern was sent into exile in Kazakhstan.39
Soviet Jews expected better of their Government after all they had suffered during the war at the hands of what had been the common enemy. Other nationalists in the Ukraine or the Baltic states had no such illusions. They carried on the fight, begun during the war, to establish independent national states and were as violently opposed to the reconquering Soviet regime as they had been to the German occupiers. Between 1944 and the early 1950s a guerrilla war was waged against the Soviet state. Much of the history of this new civil war is still unwritten. It was waged on a vast scale, and was fought with all the ferocity and passion of that earlier civil war that followed the Revolution. In Lithuania Soviet sources admitted the loss of 20,000 men, fighting a nationalist army estimated at 30,000. In Poland the Home Army revived after the Warsaw rising and was not finally wiped out until 1948; 50,000 Polish nationalists were exiled to Siberia. Thousands of Soviet and Polish troops were tied down trying to root out the irregular forces of the Ukrainian People's Army, which were said to number 20,000 in 1945. The guerrilla war was waged from bases in Poland and Czechoslovakia and was backed by thousands of Ukrainian and Polish peasants hostile to collectivization. The Government resorted to the tactics of the 1930s: mass deportations, the eradication of traditional village life, death or imprisonment for thousands of peasants. Between 1946 and 1950 an estimated 300,000 people were deported or imprisoned from the western Ukraine alone. Only repression on a vast scale could bring the borderlands under Soviet control. By the early 1950s the pacification was largely over. In 1959 the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera was murdered in West Germany by Soviet agents.40
This second war of reconquest in eastern Europe kept the Soviet Union fighting long after the war with Germany and Japan was over. The costly and brutal pacification helps to explain the official paranoia about the enemy within and Stalin's own fears for the future security of the new Soviet empire. Soviet leaders were not living in a world of invented danger; they were fighting armed resistance on what was now Soviet soil, in areas where popular hostility to Soviet Communism was widespread. Throughout the states liberated by the Red Army pro-Soviet forces were in the minority. The fragile control over these territories sharpened the conflict with the West, and provoked an almost constant state of alert against the threat of war and internal subversion. The hardening of Soviet attitudes to the West evident from 1946 onwards was a product of Soviet vulnerability as much as of Soviet strength.
The war made the Soviet Union a superpower. Victory secured the survival of Communism as a force in world politics. Only a few years before, with German forces at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad, the Soviet Union and international Communism faced complete eclipse. The turnaround in Soviet fortunes should not obscure the difficulties the Soviet Union faced in maintaining its hard-won position. Stalin did not want to risk another war; nor did he think that the West was either willing or able to attack the Soviet Union. ‘A third world war is improbable,’ he was reported to have said to a delegation of Chinese Communists, ‘if only because no one has the strength to start it.’ When the Chinese Communists asked Stal
in in 1949 for Soviet help in the conquest of Taiwan, Stalin refused on the grounds that Soviet intervention might, after all, detonate a new world war: ‘If we, as leaders, do this, the Russian people will not understand us. More than that. It could dismiss us. For underestimating its wartime and post-war misfortunes and efforts. For thoughtlessness…‘41
The chief source of Soviet vulnerability was the American possession of the atomic bomb. Soviet conventional forces were very large. In 1947, with demobilization complete, the standing army numbered almost three million. Soviet tank, aircraft and artillery deployment dwarfed anything that the West could immediately field in Europe. The nuclear threat was very different. Although Soviet leaders knew that the United States possessed a few atomic bombs and was unlikely to use them unless pushed to the very edge, the fact remained that America could inflict horrific damage on the Soviet Union while the American population remained immune to attack. ‘This situation weighed heavily on Stalin,’ Khrushchev later recalled. ‘He understood that he had to be careful not to be dragged into war.’42 The paradox arose the central paradox of the nuclear age – that security from the threat of nuclear destruction could come only through the possession of nuclear weapons.
The Soviet atomic programme began during the war. Nuclear research in the 1930s drew heavily on foreign scientific developments. When research on the possibility of nuclear fission using uranium was published abroad in 1939, few Soviet physicists thought that it would result in practical application for many years. Researchers at the Leningrad Physicotechnical Institute, led by Igor Kurchatov, published in May 1940 the first Soviet paper to suggest that nuclear fission had a military dimension. The German invasion postponed all the atomic research and diverted scientists, including Kurchatov, to other technical projects. In 1941 the British spy John Cairncross supplied Beria with detailed information that Britain was developing an atomic bomb. Late in 1941 the scientist-turned-spy, Klaus Fuchs, began to give a stream of detailed technical information to Beria's organization from his position as a researcher on the British, and later the American, atomic project.43
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