by Ludo Martens
`There are quite a number of executives who forget that the enterprises to their charge are state enterprises, and try to turn them into their own private domain, where ... they ... can do anything they fancy .... there are quite a number of executives who believe that Party decisions and Soviet laws are not written for them ....
`Anyone who attempts to conceal the truth from the Party and to deceive the Party cannot be allowed to remain in its ranks.'
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Ibid. , pp. 119--121.
Those that Malenkov denounced in this passage would soon find Khrushchev to be their representative. Khrushchev became the spokesperson for the bureaucrats when he criticized the `excessive replacement of cadres'.
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Khrushchev, `Central Committee Report', The Documentary Record of the 20th Communist Party Congress and its Aftermath (New York: Frederick A. Praeger), p. 58.
Malenkov's text allows us to better understand what was really going on in Khrushchev's diatribes against Stalin. Stalin had, he said, `abandoned the method of ideological struggle'; using the expression `enemy of the people', Stalin systematically had recourse to `mass repressions and terror'.
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Khrushchev, `Secret Report', op. cit. , pp. S14--S15.
These phrases were designed to ensure the position of those who had been attacked in Malenkov's text, those who made State enterprises into their own personal fiefdoms, those who hid the truth from the Party so that they could steal and redirect without punishment, those who blathered on with `Marxist-Leninist' phrases without the slightest intention of adhering to them. With Khrushchev, all those who aspired to become real bourgeois no longer had to fear the `mass repressions and terror' of the socialist power.
Third, Malenkov attacked those cadres who formed clans not subject to any control and that enriched themselves illegally:
`(S)ome officials themselves engage in filching collective-farm property .... these men convert to their own use common land, compel collective-farm boards and chairmen to supply them with grain, meat, milk and other produce at low prices, and even gratis'.
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Malenkov, op. cit. , p. 76.
`(S)ome of our executives do not base their selection of personnel on political and business qualifications, but on considerations of kinship, friendship and hometown ties .... Owing to such distortions of the Party line in the matter of selection and promotion of personnel, we get in some organizations close coteries who constitute themselves into a mutual insurance society and set their group interests higher than the interests of Party and state. It is not surprising that such a state of affairs usually results in degeneration and corruption.'
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Ibid. , p. 124.
`An unscrupulous and irresponsible attitude towards the carrying out of the directives of leading bodies is the most dangerous and vicious manifestation of bureaucracy.'
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Ibid. , p. 122.
`(T)he primary purpose of verification of fulfilment is to disclose shortcomings, to expose infringement of law, to help honest executives with advice, to punish the incorrigible'.
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Ibid. , pp. 125--126.
Under Khrushchev, cadres would no longer be chosen for having the best political qualities. On the contrary, those would be `purged' for being `Stalinist'. Bourgeois circles would form around Beria, Khrushchev, Mikoyan and Brezhnev, circles completely estranged from revolutionary, popular action, exactly as Malenkov described. Stalin would no longer be there to `punish the unrepentant', but the unrepentant would now punish the real Communists.
Finally, Malenkov criticized the cadres that neglected their ideological work, allowing bourgeois tendencies to emerge once again and become the dominant ideologies:
`Many Party organizations underrate the importance of ideological work, with the result that it falls short of the Party's requirements, and in many organizations is in a state of neglect ....
`(I)f the influence of socialist ideology is weakened the effect is to strengthen the influence of the bourgeois ideology ....
`(W)e still have vestiges of the bourgeois ideology, relics of the private-property mentality and morality. These relics ... are very tenacious and may strengthen their hold, and a determined struggle must be waged against them. Nor are we guaranteed against the infiltration of alien views, ideas and sentiments from outside, from the capitalist countries, or from inside, from the relics of groups hostile to the Soviet state ....'
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Ibid. , pp. 126--127.
`Whoever ... relies upon formulas learned by rote, and has no feeling for the new, is incapable of understanding home and foreign affairs'.
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Ibid. , p. 128.
`Some of our Party organizations tend to devote all their attention to economic affairs and to forget ideological matters .... Whenever attention to ideological questions is relaxed, a favourable soil is created for the revival of views and ideas hostile to us. If there are sectors of ideological work which for any reason fall out of the purview of Party organizations, if there are sectors in which Party leadership and influence have slackened, alien elements, the remnants of anti-Leninist groups smashed by the Party, will try to get hold of these sectors'.
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Ibid. , p. 127.
Khrushchev would empty Leninism of its content, transforming it into a series of slogans with no revolutionary spirit. The resulting vacuum drew in all the old social-democratic and bourgeois ideologies, that would be taken up by the youth. Furthermore, Khrushchev would falsify or simply eliminate the essential notions of Marxism-Leninism: anti-imperialist struggle, socialist revolution, dictatorship of the proletariat, continuing the class struggle, basic concepts of a Leninist Party, etc. When he spoke of `Marxist education', he proposed the opposite to Malenkov:
`It must be admitted that for many years our Party cadres were insufficiently indoctrinated in the ... practical problems of economic construction.'
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Khrushchev, `Central Committee Report', op. cit. , p. 57.
By rehabilitating opportunists and enemies who had been purged, Khrushchev allowed the resurrection of social-democratic, bourgeois and Tsarist ideological currents.
During the plenum that followed the Nineteenth Congress, Stalin was even harsher in his criticisms of Mikoyan, Molotov and Voroshilov; he almost openly clashed with Beria. All the leaders understood perfectly well that Stalin insisted upon a radical change of course. Khrushchev clearly understood the message and, like the others, made himself very scarce:
`Stalin evidently had plans to finish off the old members of the Political Bureau. He often stated that the Political Bureau members should be replaced by new ones.
`His proposal, after the 19th Congress, concerning the election of 25 persons to the Central Committee Presidium, was aimed at the removal of the old Political Bureau members and the bringing in of less experienced persons ....
`We can assume that this was also a design for the future annihilation of the old Political Bureau members and, in this way, a cover for all shameful acts of Stalin.'
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Khrushchev, `Secret Report', op. cit. , p. S63.
At the time, Stalin was a old man, tired and sick. He acted with caution. Having made the conclusion that the members of the Politburo were no longer trustworthy, he introduced more revolutionary minded youth to the presidium, in order to temper and test them. The revisionists and plotters like Khrushchev, Beria and Mikoyan knew that they would soon lose their positions.
Still according to Khrushchev, Stalin is to have said to the members of the Politburo, after the Doctor's Plot in the end of 1952:
`You are blind like young kittens; what will happen without me? The country will perish because you do not know how to recognize enemies.'
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Ibid. , p. S49.
Khrushchev put forward that statement as proof of Stalin's folly and paranoia. But history has shown that the comment was correct.
Khrushchev's c
oup d'йtat
Beria's intrigues
Zhdanov, Stalin's probable successor, died in August 1948. Even before his death, a woman doctor, Lydia Timashuk, accused Stalin's doctors of having applied an inappropriate treatment to accelerate his death. She would repeat these accusations later on.
During the year 1949, almost all of Zhdanov's entourage was arrested and executed. Kuznetsov, Secretary of the Central Committee and Zhdanov's right hand man; Rodionov, Prime Minister of the Russian Republic; and Voznesensky, President of the Plan, were the main victims. They were among the most influential new cadres. Khrushchev claims that their elimination was due to Beria's intrigues.
Stalin had criticized some of Voznesensky's theories, according to which the law of value should be used to determine the distribution of capital and labor among the different sectors. In that case, replied Stalin, capital and labor forces would migrate to light industry, which is more profitable, and hinder heavy industry:
`(T)he sphere of operation of the law of value is severely restricted and strictly delimited in our economic system (by) ... the law of planned (balanced) development of the national economy'.
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Stalin, `Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.', The Documentary Record of the 19th Communist Party Congress and the Reorganization After Stalin's Death (New York: Frederick A. Praeger), p. 5.
However, in his text, Stalin refuted these opportunist points of view without treating their authors as traitors. According to Khrushchev, Stalin intervened several times for Voznesensky's liberation and appointment as head of the State Bank.
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Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, op. cit. , p.`251.
As for Timashuk's accusations against Zhdanov's doctors, Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, recalled that her father, at first, `did not believe the doctors were `dishonest' '.
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S. Alliluyeva, p. 215; cited in Bland, op. cit. , p. 4.
Abakumov, Minister of State Security, close to Beria, was then leading the inquiry. But in the end of 1951, Ignatiev, a Party man with no experience in security, replaced Abakumov, who was arrested for lack of vigilance. Had Abakumov protected his boss, Beria?
The inquiry was then led by Ryumin, the man formerly responsible for Security in Stalin's personal secretariat. Nine doctors were arrested, accused of being `connected with the international Jewish bourgeois nationalist organisation `JOINT' (American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee), established by American intelligence'.
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Pravda, 13 January 1953, p. 4; cited in Bland, op. cit. , p. 18.
This affair was understood as Stalin's first attack against Beria. The second attack took place simultaneously. In November 1951, leaders of the Communist Party of Georgia were arrested for redirecting public funds and for theft of State property and were accused of being bourgeois nationalist forces with links to Anglo-American imperialism. In the ensuing purge, more than half of the Central Committee members, known as Beria's men, lost their position.
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J. Ducoli, `The Georgian Purges (1951--1953)', Caucasian Review, vol. 6, pp. 55, 1958; cited in Bland, op. cit. , p. 11--13.
The new First Secretary stated in his report that the purge was undertaken `upon Comrade Stalin's personal instructions'.
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A. Mgdelaze, Report to Congress of Georgian Communist Party, Sept. 1952; cited in Bland, op. cit. , p. 24.
Stalin's death
A few months before Stalin's death, the entire security system that protected him was dismantled. Alexandr Proskrebychev, his personal secretary, who had assisted him since 1928 with remarkable efficiency, was fired and placed under house arrest. He had allegedly redirected secret documents. Lieutenant-Colonel Nikolay Vlasik, Chief of Stalin's personal security for the previous 25 years, was arrested on December 16, 1952 and died several weeks later in prison.
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P. Deriabin, Watchdogs of Terror: Russian Bodyguards from the Tsars to the Commissars (1984), p. 321; cited in Bland, op. cit. , p. 24.
Major-General Petr Kosynkin, Vice-Commander of the Kremlin Guard, responsible for Stalin's security, died of a `heart attack' on February 17, 1953. Deriabin wrote:
`(This) process of stripping Stalin of all his personal security (was) a studied and very ably handled business'.
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Deriabin, op. cit. , p. 209; cited in Bland, op. cit. , p. 27.
Only Beria was capable of preparing such a plot.
On March 1, at 23:00, Stalin's guards found him on the floor in his room, unconscious. They reached the members of the Politburo by telephone. Khrushchev claimed that he also arrived, and that each went back home.
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Deriabin, op. cit. , p. 300.
No-one called a doctor. Twelve hours after his attack, Stalin received first aid. He died on March 5. Lewis and Whitehead write:
`Some historians see evidence of premeditated murder. Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov sees the cause in Stalin's visible preparation of a purge to rival those of the thirties'.
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J. Lewis and P. Whitehead, Stalin: A Time for Judgment (London, 1990), p. 279; cited in Bland, op. cit. , p. 34.
Immediately after Stalin's death, a meeting of the presidium was convened. Beria proposed that Malenkov be President of the Council of Ministers and Malenkov proposed that Beria be named Vice-President and Minister of Internal Affairs and State Security.
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Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, op. cit. , p. 324.
During the following months, Beria dominated the political scene. `We were going through a very dangerous period', wrote Khrushchev.
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Ibid. , p. 331.
Once installed as head of Security, Beria had Proskrebychev, Stalin's secretary, arrested; then Ryumin, who had led the inquiry into Zhdanov's suspicious death. Ignatiev, Ryumin's boss, was denounced for his rфle in the same affair. On April 3, the doctors accused of having killed Zhdanov were liberated. The Zionist author Wittlin claimed that by rehabilitating the Jewish doctors, Beria wanted to `denigrate ... Stalin's aggressive foreign policy against the West, the United States and Great Britain primarily'.
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Wittlin, op. cit. , p. 388.
Still in April, Beria organized a counter-coup in his native region, Georgia. Once again he placed his men at the top of the Party and the State. Dekanozov, later shot along with Beria, became Minister of State Security, replacing Rukhadze, arrested as `enemy of the people'.
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Bland, op. cit. , p. 46.
Khrushchev's intrigues against Beria
Meanwhile, Khrushchev was plotting against Beria. He first acquired the support from Beria's `protйgй, Malenkov, then talked with the others, individually. The last to be contacted was Mikoyan, Beria's best friend. On June 24, the presidium was convened so that Beria could be arrested. Mikoyan stated that Beria `would take our criticisms to heart and reform himself'.
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Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, op. cit. , p. 337.
On a prearranged signal, eleven marshals and generals, led by Zhukov, entered the room and arrested Beria, who would be shot along with his collaborators on December 23, 1953.
On July 14, 1953, General Alexei Antonov and Major-General Efimov organized a `coup d'йtat' in the Georgian Communist Party and pushed out Beria's men. Mzhavanadze, former Lieutenant-General, became the Party's Prime Minister.
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Bland, op. cit. , pp. 55--57.
Ryumin was arrested by Beria on April 5, 1953. Fifteen months later, the Khrushchevites would condemn him for his rфle in the `Doctors' Plot'. On July 23, he was shot. But his boss Ignatiev, protected by Khrushchev, was named First Secretary of the Bashkir Republik.
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Ibid. , pp. 67--70.
At the end of December 1954, Abakumov , former Minister of State Security, and his associates, were condemned to death for having fabricated, on Beria's orders, the `Leningrad Affair' against Voznesensky and his friends.
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