Russia A History
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It was shortly the turn of the cinema industry. In September 1946 the Central Committee attacked several recent films, including those by the highly regarded directors V. I. Pudovkin and S. M. Eisenstein. The film that brought Eisenstein to grief was his historical epic Ivan the Terrible, part II. Stalin had greatly enjoyed the first part in 1944; he may even have identified with its depiction of Ivan IV as a fearless nationalist and decisive leader surrounded by traitorous boyars. But the second part, which showed a doubting, half-crazed tsar unleashing a reign of terror, was too much for the Soviet despot. Eisenstein was compelled publicly to apologize for his mistakes.
Other spheres of thought and culture also underwent ideological purification in the post-war years, from theatre and art to philosophy and economics. Nor was music spared; in February 1948 the party censured such distinguished composers as D. D. Shostakovich, S. S. Prokofiev, and A. I. Khachaturian for ‘formalism’ and insufficient use of folk themes. Even the natural sciences were not immune from persecution. Thus the expulsion of twelve persons from the Academy of Agricultural Sciences in August 1948 confirmed the triumph of the quack agronomist T. D. Lysenko, whose bizarre theory—that characteristics acquired by an organism in one generation could be genetically transmitted to the next—was utterly incompatible with modern biology and genetics. But the regime embraced Lysenko, whose ‘discoveries’ held the promise of limitless human power over nature. Soviet agriculture and biological science were to bear the scars of Lysenkoism for years.
Zhdanov died in the summer of 1948, but the cultural repression persisted. In early 1949 the press exposed an ‘unpatriotic group of drama critics’. And at the Nineteenth Congress of the Party in 1952, G. M. Malenkov was still insisting that the typicality of a novel’s characters bore witness to the correctness of the author’s ideological attitude.
Foreign Policy and the Cold War
Wartime alliances almost never persist once the threat that brought them into existence disappears. It is hardly surprising, therefore that the bonds of the Grand Alliance predictably weakened in the aftermath of the war. The deteriorating relationship between the Soviet Union and its former allies soon gave way to the overt hostility of the Cold War. From Washington, it appeared that Stalin was orchestrating a world-wide campaign of aggression against the West. The year 1946 saw Soviet pressure on Turkey over the Dardanelles, a communist insurrection in Greece, and the establishment of Soviet-backed Azeri and Kurdish regimes in northern Iran. Simultaneously the communization of Eastern Europe proceeded apace, culminating in the dramatic Czechoslovak coup of February 1948. Later that same summer, Stalin blockaded the western zones of occupied Berlin. The following year Mao Tse-tung defeated his nationalist enemies and proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. And in 1950 Kim Il Sung’s forces swarmed across the 38th parallel, touching off the Korean War.
There are, of course, many theories about the origins of the Cold War. Some of the more fanciful blossomed precisely because the dearth of reliable information about the Soviet side made it impossible ultimately to disprove them. Thus while some works argued that Stalin initially sought accommodation with the West and only took the path of confrontation in 1948, others argued the exact reverse—that Stalin was harshest towards the West prior to that date and at his most conciliatory thereafter. Still other studies concluded that Stalin was weaker after the Second World War than before, and accounted for the evolution of Soviet foreign policy largely in terms of domestic politics or the clashing preferences of his subordinates.
With the partial opening of Soviet archives, we now have more evidence than before. The data are, however, far from complete; no definitive interpretation of Soviet foreign relations has yet emerged. The discussion that follows is based on three premises: that Stalin was firmly in charge of international affairs; that he was both an ideologue and a geopolitician; and that two signal post-war objectives were to avoid war while strengthening Soviet control over foreign communist parties.
Stalin was not, in principle, averse to war. In fact, his Marxist Weltanschauung predisposed him to believe in inevitable armed conflict between the Soviet Union and the capitalist world. In the spring of 1945, as Soviet tanks rolled towards Berlin, he informed a horrified delegation of Yugoslavian communists that ‘the war will soon be over. We shall recover in fifteen or twenty years and then we will have another go at it.’
As that comment suggests, Stalin was aware that the Soviet Union was too devastated to wage war in the near future. Then, too, the United States had emerged from the Second World War with greatly increased relative strength and with the atomic bomb. But here was the rub: Soviet ideology made all capitalist regimes ipso facto anti-communist. What then would prevent a great capitalist coalition, led by the United States, from exploiting the Soviet Union’s temporary debility to launch an annihilating attack? How was Stalin to shield the USSR from such a blow?
The answer was to bluff—to project an exaggerated image of Soviet military might. This entailed denying the West accurate knowledge about the true situation within the Soviet Union by waging a massive counter-intelligence campaign, by prohibiting even the most mundane contacts between Soviet citizens and foreigners, and by severely curtailing the movements and activities of Western diplomats, attachés, journalists, even tourists. Swathed in an impermeable miasma, thought to be possessed of overwhelming military power, the Soviet Union would buy the time necessary to rebuild, rearm, and acquire nuclear weapons. Thus, paradoxically and counter-intuitively the best way to avoid war was to pretend that the USSR was in fact ready to risk one.
Simultaneously Stalin had to avoid unnecessarily provoking the West or arousing Western suspicions, but to take a hard line against the plots that the imperialists would surely concoct against the USSR. In 1946, for instance, he backed the Azeri and Kurdish separatists in northern Iran (in response to what he saw as British oil intrigues). His government condemned the Marshall Plan in 1947 and ordered the French and Italian communists to sabotage it. And in June 1948, he retaliated to a Western currency reform (which he thought prefigured the establishment of a capitalist West Germany) by imposing the Berlin blockade.
Yet Stalin was willing to retreat when the price of confrontation grew too high or threatened war. For example, he pulled out of northern Iran, informing the Azeri communists that he did not want to give Britain an excuse to remain in Egypt, Syria, and Indonesia. And after eight months of tension he lifted the blockade of Berlin.
Stalin thus attempted to strike an extremely delicate balance in the conduct of foreign relations, but if successful the Soviet Union might benefit in both the long and short term. After all, Soviet truculence might persuade Western governments that the USSR was too hard a nut to crack. In that event, capitalist states might soon revert to their usual rapacious competition for markets. With any luck, such commercial rivalry might produce internecine wars among the capitalist states, which could debilitate them all, thereby advantageously positioning the USSR for the eventual day of military reckoning.
Another important objective for Stalin was to reimpose discipline and centralized control over the international communist movement. There were several considerations operating here. First, Stalin believed that he alone could formulate the correct strategy and tactics, which should be binding on communists everywhere. His leadership was particularly necessary to prevent headstrong foreign communists from unduly alarming the Western powers. Second, if directed by Moscow, non-ruling communist parties and front groups might pressure Western governments to act in ways favourable to Soviet interests. Third, the maximum economic exploitation of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe would only be possible if communist governments were installed there. Although Stalin might have been delighted by the prospect of further acquisitions in Europe and Asia, these could be forgone. But Eastern Europe was nonnegotiable; it was the great prize the Soviet Union had won in the Second World War. The East European countries were to be Sovietized; as Stalin put it, ‘whoever
occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.’ It goes without saying that Stalin expected the Eastern European communists to submit obediently to his dictation.
The problem, however, was that many foreign communists exhibited an annoying independence. Non-ruling parties were eager to make gains; communists who had seized power in Eastern Europe were often too ideologically fervid to heed Stalin’s cautionary advice. The Chinese communists are a good example: despite Stalin’s suggestion that they form a coalition with the nationalists, they made a hard push for military victory in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Similarly Stalin opposed the Greek communist insurrection of 1946–8 as premature. The Czechoslovakian coup of February 1948—an event usually interpreted as awakening even the most generous Western observers to Stalin’s ambitions—was very likely launched by the Czech communists themselves, not at Moscow’s behest. Finally, the Soviet–Yugoslavian rupture of 1948 originated in Stalin’s inability to moderate Tito’s recklessness either at home or abroad.
Stalin sought to impose his will on the Eastern European communists by a variety of means. One was territorial expansion. A series of post-war treaties annexed large parts of eastern Prussia, eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and Ruthenia to the Soviet state. This westward expansion gave the Soviet Union a common border with its Czechoslovak and Hungarian client states. Another instrument was the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), established in 1948, specifically to ensure Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe. Finally after the break with Tito, Stalin resorted to an ‘anti-nationalism’ campaign of terror and purges. Important communist leaders such as R. Slansky (Czechoslovakia), T. Kostov (Bulgaria), W. Gomulka (Poland), and L. Rajk (Hungary) were imprisoned or executed, as were thousands of others.
Certain elements of Stalin’s post-war domestic and foreign agendas were closely interrelated. The key imperatives—war avoidance and economic reconstruction—were obviously congruent. The explosion in the labour camp population also served to fulfil several of Stalin’s goals; it mobilized forced labour to rebuild the country and insulated Soviet society from first-hand testimony about the West. And, significantly, Stalin did achieve several key objectives. A robust Soviet economy rose out of the rubble of war; the USSR enhanced its military power. Stalin’s regime made significant investments in military research and development, developed a plan to modernize its military hardware, and broke the American nuclear monopoly by acquiring its own atomic bomb in 1949.
Yet it is also obvious that other components in Stalin’s programme were contradictory. Bellicose rhetoric, if essential to justify the demands on the Soviet population, invalidated both the Soviet peace offensives as well as efforts to confuse the West about Soviet intentions. The same point applies to efforts to control Eastern Europe. Since Stalin’s authority over the foreign communists was at first imperfect, he could not prevent such events as the Greek civil war from frightening Western statesmen. But his own territorial expansion and political terror, used to solidify his power in Eastern Europe, tended to confirm, rather than allay, Western suspicions. The most important contradictions lay in the irreconcilability among Stalin’s domestic and foreign objectives. In 1945 Stalin had expected a rapid American withdrawal from a weakened, squabbling Europe. By 1949, largely because of his own policies, he found himself confronting European states that were reacquiring confidence and repairing the damage of war. NATO was cementing Western unity and the United States had extended an open-ended political commitment to the new alliance. After Stalin authorized the Korean War (partially as a subtle bid to enhance his influence with Mao Tse-tung) that American commitment became much more military.
Stalin’s Last Years
In December 1949 Stalin celebrated his seventieth birthday. It was an occasion of national jubilation. The price of many consumer goods was lowered. Party and state organizations all over the country vied with each other in tendering gifts and extravagant professions of loyalty to the great leader. A special exhibition—‘J. V. Stalin in Representational Art’—opened, featuring scores of paintings and sculptures to glorify every phase of his life. The official review of the exhibition bore the title: ‘An Inexhaustible Source of Creative Inspiration’.
The post-war era was the apogee of Stalin’s cult of personality. Stalin was accorded god-like veneration: he was the hero of plays and the subject of folksongs; symphonies and odes were composed in his honour; canals and dams were dedicated to his name. Statues of gypsum, concrete, granite, and marble were erected in his image. Orators praised him as ‘the father of the peoples’, ‘the coryphaeus of all sciences’, the ‘highest genius of mankind’, and ‘the best friend of all children’. Rapturous enthusiasm greeted his every pronouncement. When he took it into his head to author a treatise on linguistics, learned philologists wrote letters to the newspapers humbly thanking the leader for setting them straight.
However gratifying, universal adulation did not relax Stalin’s vigilant concern for his personal power. In the last years of his reign the tyrant took pains to keep his closest associates in a constant state of poisonous antagonism and mutual suspicion. It is not known whether his motivation was authentic fear of conspiracy, belief in the efficacy of divide et impera, or mere perversity. Immediately after the war, Stalin elevated Zhdanov as a counterweight to Malenkov Upon the former’s death, Stalin permitted Malenkov and the chief of the secret police, Beria, to purge Zhdanov’s old power base in Leningrad on the charge of ‘anti-party activity’. This ‘Leningrad affair’ resulted in the expulsion of two thousand communists from party and state jobs and two hundred executions, including that of N. A. Voznesenskii, a member of the Politburo. Stalin then summoned N. S. Khrushchev from Ukraine to Moscow as a counterweight to Malenkov. As for Beria, the Georgian purges of 1951 exterminated many of his staunchest supporters and political clients.
The most ominous manifestation of Stalin’s mistrust of his subordinates occurred in the very last months of his life. In January 1953 the press announced the arrest of nine physicians for conspiring to assassinate the top Soviet leadership with toxic medical treatments. Anti-Semitism, on the ascent in the USSR since the end of the war, figured prominently in the ‘doctor’s plot’—seven of the accused were Jewish. The ‘plot’, it has been speculated, was the first step in a campaign of terror against Jews. In any event, Stalin most probably instigated the affair of the ‘doctor murderers’ to serve as a pretext for the elimination of Beria, and perhaps other high figures in the regime.
Before any of this could happen, on 5 March 1953 Stalin finally died of a stroke. The official announcement of his passing evoked shock and then grief from millions. The dictator’s body reposed in state within the Kremlin, and columns of mourners paid their last respects. Even as a corpse Stalin brought calamity: five hundred people were trampled to death in Moscow because of poor security on the day of his funeral. Stalin was gone, but Stalinism remained. There would ensue a struggle for the succession. And when this was over, Stalin’s heirs would undertake the reconstruction and reform of the system he had bequeathed them.
13. From Stalinism to Stagnation 1953–1985
GREGORY L. FREEZE
After 1953, as the structural faults became increasingly apparent, Stalin’s successors applied various panaceas to repair or conceal the fissures. But neither the spasmodic reformism of Khrushchev nor the systematic standpattism of Brezhnev had much effect. Despite superpower status abroad and repression at home, by the early 1980s the USSR—like its leadership—was tottering on the verge of collapse.
AFTER decades of personalized tyranny, news of Stalin’s illness had a traumatic impact on the population. Recalling the recent ‘doctors’ plot’ (with transparent anti-Semitic overtones), some contemporaries suspected that ‘the doctors are involved in this. If that is confirmed, then the people will be still more outraged against the Jews.’ Many found the idea of life without the all-k
nowing Vozhd′ (Leader) unthinkable. Hope of instantaneous justice was gone. As one letter to the Central Committee put it: once Stalin is dead, ‘there won’t be anyone to complain to. If something happens now, people say: “We’ll complain to Comrade Stalin”, but now there won’t be anyone.’
But there was ‘someone’, in fact several of them, all fighting to succeed the Leader. That successor, however, would inherit not only the panoply of power but also the other legacy of Stalinist rule: a host of critical problems. These problems unleashed a torrent of letters to newspapers, government organs, and especially the Central Committee.
The problems were daunting in their complexity and gravity. One was power itself: Stalin himself had so personalized power, leaving the lines of institutional authority so amorphous and confused, that many key organs (even the Central Committee) had atrophied and virtually disappeared. To re-establish regular governance, it was essential to rebuild the institutions of party and state administration. Related to this was another grisly legacy—the victims and survivors of the purge and terror. Apart from posthumous rehabilitation, the most urgent question concerned the two million politicals and common criminals currently in the GULAG and still larger numbers in exile and banishment. Stalin’s heirs also had to resolve critical economic questions—above all, whether to continue Stalin’s one-sided industrialization (which emphasized heavy industry) or to develop agriculture and light industry. The Stalinist model, as one acerbic letter to the Central Committee noted, had produced not communism but ‘deficitism’. N. S. Khrushchev admitted that ‘there is little milk or meat’ and asked: ‘What kind of communism is this if there are no sweets or butter?’ That ‘deficitism’ exacerbated social tensions, for it did not apply to everyone. Stalinist social policy had vigorously combatted ‘levelling’ (uranilovka) in favour of sharp wage differentials and a highly stratified social order, with scarce resources being diverted to political élites and the scientific-technical intelligentsia. A letter to the Central Committee complained bitterly that ‘of late our country has simply forgotten the simple person—the worker, the kolkhoznik. All that the press and radio talk about is the academicians, scholars, agronomists, engineers.’ Another critical domestic issue was minority tensions, especially in the newly annexed territories of the West. As authorities confirmed, ‘in many districts [of western Ukraine] an anti-Soviet nationalist underground still exists and is actively operating as armed bands that commit sabotage, plunder, and terrorize the population and party-Soviet activists’.