PART FIVE
Stalin’s mind was a stopped clock. There was no chance in 1945 that he would satisfy popular yearnings for reform. His assumptions about policy had hardened like stalactites. He knew what he was doing. If he had relaxed the regime, he would have imperilled his personal supremacy. This consideration counted more for him than evidence that his mode of rule undermined the objective of durable economic competitiveness and political dynamism. Stalin thought strictly within the frame of his worldview and operational assumptions. The habits of despotism had anaesthetised him to human suffering. The man who digested a daily multitude of facts disregarded information he found uncongenial.
Only his death or drastic physical incapacitation might have moved the mechanisms towards reform. He might easily have died in the first half of October 1945 when the condition of his heart gave him problems.1 The years were catching up with him. He had had patches of ill health since the Revolution, and the Second World War had levied a heavy toll. At the age of sixty-six he was long past his physical prime. His cardiac problem was kept a state secret and he took a two-month vacation;2 but this had been nothing unusual for him in the inter-war years. Not even the members of his entourage were initiated into the details of his condition – they were simply left to surmise that he was suffering from an illness of passing significance. Apart from his physician Vladimir Vinogradov, no one had an inkling of the medical prognosis. Politburo members knew they had to desist from any display of inquisitiveness. It would have been dangerous for Stalin to think they were aware of his growing frailty. He would instantly have suspected that a coup against him was in the offing. He needed only a scintilla of doubt about individuals to flash in his mind before consigning them to the security police.
Despite his bodily decline, he could go on ruling the USSR through the existing institutions, personnel and procedures. Stalin’s personal supremacy rested upon the maintenance of the one-party dictatorship. Ideocracy and terror remained indispensable instruments of his despotism – and he never wavered in his determination to sustain it. He did not retreat from his intentions towards the wider world and aimed at a further strengthening of the USSR’s position as a great power. He reinforced Soviet hegemony over countries on the western borders: the zone of Europe conquered by the Red Army was to be held tightly within his grasp; and opportunities were to be sought to extend the USSR’s influence in Asia. Having won the war against the Third Reich, Stalin did not intend to lose the peace to the Western Allies. At a meeting with his intimates, he ordered them ‘to deliver a strong blow’ against any suggestion of the desirability of ‘democracy’ in the USSR.3 In Stalin’s opinion, democratic aspirations in Soviet society were the unfortunate consequence of co-operation with the USA and the United Kingdom from 1941. Western politicians after 1917 had feared the spread of the revolutionary bacillus from Russia; Stalin from 1945 dreaded his USSR becoming afflicted with counter-revolutionary infections: parliaments and markets to his mind were the diseased products of the capitalist order which had to be stopped from leaching their poison into his country.
He cultivated peaceful relations with his Western allies and sought economic benefit through increased trade and loans. He allowed a widening of the scope of public debate after the war. He contemplated measures to expand the provision of industrial consumer goods. Yet already he made such any such orientation subsidiary to the achievement of other priorities. Stalin let nothing get in the way of the enhancement of the country’s military might and security – and he set about dedicating vast resources to the acquisition of his own A-bomb and to the subjugation of eastern and east-central Europe to the Kremlin. The question was not whether Stalin would rule moderately or fiercely, but how fiercely he would decide to rule. The connection between internal and external policies was intimate. Ferocity in the USSR had ramifications abroad. Equally important was the likelihood that any expected deterioration in relations with the Western Allies would induce him to reinforce repressive measures at home.
Stalin had deported several Caucasian nationalities to the wilds of Kazakhstan in 1943–4. He had arrested the various elites of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania when he reannexed those states in 1944; the victims were either shot, thrown into the Gulag or dumped in Siberian settlements. Dekulakisation and declericalisation were bloodily imposed and 142,000 citizens of these new Soviet republics were deported in 1945–9.4 Stalin set the intelligence agencies to work at catching anyone disloyal to himself and the state. He put Soviet POWs through ‘filtration’ camps after their liberation from German captivity. An astonishing 2,775,700 former soldiers in the Red Army were subjected to interrogation upon repatriation, and about half of them landed up in a labour camp.5Everywhere the police and party were looking out for insubordination. Marxist–Leninist propaganda had regained prominence toward the end of the war, and this emphasis continued after 1945. Citizens of the USSR were to be left with no illusions: the pre-war order was going to be reintroduced with a vengeance.
The Soviet armed forces and security agencies had their hands full inside the USSR’s own borders. Even the task of feeding the army was difficult.6 Resistance was intense in those regions which had lain outside the USSR before the Second World War. Partisan warfare in defence of nationhood, religion and social custom was intense in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, western Belorussia and western Ukraine. Stalin was not alone in the Kremlin leadership in thinking that massive retaliation was required. The word went forth that the new borders of the USSR were permanent and non-negotiable and that its citizens would have to accept the fact or suffer the punitive consequences. Stalin was turning the country into a military camp. By assuming the title Generalissimus – like one of his heroes, Suvorov – on 28 June 1945 he signalled the regimentation he was going to imprint on Soviet public life. Uniforms, conscription and armaments were lauded. Pravda editorials were full of injunctions to obey party and government. The need for state defence was regularly conveyed by the media. There was no sense that peacetime would last long. The official media insisted that further sacrifices would be required of society.
Across the half of Europe it controlled, meanwhile, the USSR reinforced the victory achieved over Nazi Germany. The Red Army and the NKVD confined the ‘liberated’ peoples to a framework of policies favourable to the local communist parties. Stalin had been preparing for this outcome for a couple of years. Former diplomats Maxim Litvinov and Ivan Maiski, whom he had sacked when he deemed them altogether too soft on the Western Allies, continued to be charged with preparing confidential papers on the future of both Europe and the Grand Alliance.7 Germany’s defeat made it urgent to lay down practical guidelines for the USSR’s hegemony over eastern Europe. Stalin adopted a differentiated strategy. In Germany he aimed to maximise his influence in Prussia, which lay in the Soviet occupation zone, without causing diplomatic conflict with his allies. In the other countries he had greater flexibility but still had to tread carefully. Communists were few outside Yugoslavia and had only a small following. At first Stalin moved cautiously. While inserting communists into coalition ministries, he eschewed the establishment of undiluted communist dictatorships.
Stalin’s foreign policy beyond the countries under the Soviet Union’s direct control was complex. It never stopped evolving. He hesitated to annoy the other members of the Grand Alliance; he did not want to jeopardise his gains in eastern and east-central Europe while lacking the military capacity to match the Americans. He was also eager to get the most out of the wartime relationship with the USA. The wreckage of the war left little scope for the USSR to export grain, oil and timber to pay for imports of machinery and technology, as Stalin had done in the 1930s. An American state loan would help enormously, and for a couple of years this remained one of his prime objectives.
Simultaneously he and Molotov intended to maximise Soviet influence around the world. The blood of the Soviet wartime dead in their opinion had earned Moscow the right to assert itself just as Washington and London did. The eastern half of Europe was not the limit of their pretensions. After Mussolini’s Italian Empire collapsed, Stalin instructed Molotov to press for newly liberated Libya to be declared a Soviet protectorate. Nor was he quick to withdraw the Red Army from northern Iran, where Azeris were the majority of the population. There was talk in the Kremlin of annexing the territory to Soviet Azerbaijan – the Azerbaijani communist leadership were especially keen on this.8 Whether Stalin seriously expected the Western Allies to give way is unknown. Perhaps he was just chancing his arm. He was anyway realistic enough to see that the USSR would not dent the ‘Anglo-American hegemony’ in most parts of the globe until his scientists had developed bombs of the type dropped by the US Air Force on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like Hitler, Stalin had failed to understand the destructive potential of nuclear weapons. He intended to rectify the situation by putting Politburo member Beria in charge of the Soviet research programme. The task was to enable the USSR to catch up with the Americans without delay.
The Kremlin’s other inmates were no less brutal than Stalin; they would no longer have had their posts if they had not proved themselves by his amoral standards. Yet their knowledge of conditions in the USSR made several of them doubt the desirability of pre-war policies. Stalin eventually witnessed how bad things were. In summer 1946 he went by car to the Black Sea. His caravan of vehicles made slow progress. The roads were in a terrible state and Stalin and his guests, together with hundreds of guards, stopped over in many towns. He was greeted by local communist leaders who fell over themselves to show their prowess in regenerating the country after the destruction of 1941–5. In Ukraine, where the shortage of grain was already turning into famine, Stalin was served exquisitely prepared food. Each evening his table groaned with meat, fish, vegetables and fruit. But the attempts at camouflage did not work. With his own eyes he could see at the roadsides that people were still living in holes in the ground and that wartime debris lay everywhere – and this, according to his housekeeper Valentina Istomina, made Stalin nervous.9 If he had travelled in his railway carriage FD 3878, he would have missed seeing this.
He got over such concerns. He was not going to alter policies merely because most citizens, after a gruelling war, were hungry and destitute. He was confident that he could continue to impose a state budget that minimised attention to popular well-being. Politburo members soon understood this. If they wanted to influence the programme of party and government, they had to be wary about how they presented their ideas to the Leader – and sometimes they overestimated his level of tolerance. Several ideas were put into public discussion after 1945. Politburo members had to do this with caution if they were to survive not just politically but also in a physical sense. But they were also useless to Stalin if they failed to offer a strategic view on the USSR’s difficulties. He demanded this of his subordinates; they were not allowed merely to administer existing policies. Stalin had a talent for getting them to reveal what was in their minds. This was not very difficult since he had the power of life and death over them. At the same time they knew this and yet had to pretend to him and to themselves that they did not. While Stalin remained alive, they had to play the game according to his rules.
Several of them – Beria, Malenkov and Khrushchëv – later showed an understanding that the degree of the regime’s repressiveness was counter-productive. There was an economic aspect to this. When the annual accounts were drawn up, it became crystal-clear that the Gulag forced-labour system cost the state more than it earned in revenues; and monetary incentives began to be introduced to raise productivity in the camps.10 This was hardly surprising. The wretches who worked with inadequate food and medical care in Siberia and northern Russia did not operate with the efficiency of free men and women. In order to hold them captive, moreover, a vast legion of administrators, guards, railwaymen and secretaries was required. This system of unofficial slavery was not the most cost-effective way to obtain timber, gold and uranium. But nobody could afford to say this directly to the Leader for fear of joining the slave-gangs. But the truth of the Gulag was known in the supreme ruling group.
Other parts of Stalin’s programme also gnawed at the minds of several Politburo members. Malenkov was later to espouse the cause of light industry; he especially advocated the need to increase industry’s commitment to the production of consumer goods. Beria was subsequently concerned that official policy continued to offend those who did not belong to the Russian nation; he also objected to the extreme controls over cultural self-expression. Khrushchëv, with his sense of the rudimentary requirements of most citizens, felt that agrarian reform was vital. About foreign policy it was even more dangerous to express an opinion; and after the initial debate about the chances of the world communist movement Stalin clamped down: it remained for leading Soviet politicians on Stalin’s death – again it was Beria and Malenkov – to insist that a Third World War would be a disaster for the human race. Beneath the surface of official politics there was appreciation that something had to change. Several Politburo members understood that the rigidities of Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism after the war provided no permanent solution. Things had to change not only for the good of the members of the Politburo but also in order to conserve the power and prestige of the USSR.
While Stalin lived, however, his policies were unchallengeable. He was not completely inflexible and some wartime ‘compromises’ remained in place. He did not abandon the wartime understanding with the Russian Orthodox Church. Those churches which had been reopened in the war continued to function, and the Patriarch agreed to act as unofficial ambassador for the ‘peace policy’ of the Soviet government – and the Russian Orthodox Church avidly occupied buildings which had previously belonged to other Christian denominations.
Stalin also persisted with the ideological favour shown to the Russians in wartime. This was obvious in historical textbooks. Before 1941 it was still acceptable to show respect for those who resisted the expansion of the Russian Empire. Shamil, the Moslem cleric who fought the armies of Nicholas I and Alexander II in Dagestan and Chechnya, was given his due as an anti-tsarist hero. After the Second World War his reputation was consistently blackened. Indeed each and every figure in the pre-revolutionary past who had failed to welcome the armies of the tsars was condemned as reactionary. Russia had allegedly brought culture, enlightenment and order to its borderlands. The treatment of Shamil was a litmus test of the development of policy on the national question. So too was the visual symbolism of the urban landscape. For the octocentenary celebration of Moscow’s foundation in September 1947, Stalin commissioned a statue of Prince Yuri Dolgoruki for erection on Gorki Street. Its chain-mailed muscularity was designed to induce awe at the greatness of medieval Muscovy.11 Stalin’s toast to the Russian nation on 24 May 1945 had been no fleeting fancy.
Even the limits of cultural expression were as wide as they had been in the war. In the arts and scholarship the situation remained marginally freer than before the Great Patriotic War. The composer Shostakovich and the poet Akhmatova still wrote pieces for public performance. Scholars, too, went on benefiting from a working environment which was less stringent than before the war.
The level of material provision for Soviet citizens continued to exercise the minds of Stalin and his government; they remained cognisant of the high level of expectations among the peoples of the USSR once the war had been won. Initially Stalin did not plan for an economy of shortage. Although he imposed heavy control over politics, he still aimed to expand the supply of food and industrial products through the retail trade. Several governmental decrees confirmed this purpose in 1946–8.12 There was much talk about stimulating the production and distribution of consumer goods, and it was recognised that some reorganisation of commercial structures would be needed.13 For this to happen there also had to be an end to wartime inflation. In December 1947 party and government abruptly announced a devaluation of the ruble. The savings of citizens were automatically reduced to a tenth of what they had been. A decree was passed in the same month to terminate the ration-book system: Soviet citizens had to buy what they could with the rubles in their pocket or under their mattress.14
The USSR was not the only state to take drastic action for post-war economic regeneration. Yet few governments behaved with so little regard for the difficulties posed for consumers. Announcements were made suddenly and without warning. Stalin had always ruled that way. He expected ‘the people’ to accept docilely what he demanded. Although he irritated millions of citizens by devaluing the currency, he scarcely induced their ruination: the reason they had had so much money was that they could not find the goods to spend it on. His own savings were depreciated by the devaluation decree; but he had never been a materialistic man. Unopened pay-packets were found at his Blizhnyaya dacha when he died. What mattered to Stalin was not wealth but power. In any case he and his close subordinates were protected by the network of special shops from any untoward financial effects. Stalin had for a long time intimidated those reporting to him into playing down news of hardship. It was in 1947 that a terrible famine occurred across Ukraine. Khrushchëv had to deal with it as party boss in Kiev. While appealing to the Kremlin for assistance, he was careful lest Stalin should conclude that he had gone soft. Stalin therefore did not hear how bad the situation was.15
Yet even Khrushchëv’s cautious words got him into trouble: ‘Stalin sent me the rudest, most insulting telegram which said I was a suspect person: I was writing memoranda to try and show that Ukraine could not fulfil its state procurement [quotas], and I was requesting an outrageous amount of ration-cards to feed people.’16 Stalin was not responsible for the drought that had ruined the 1946 harvest. But he remained the founder and director of the collective-farm system and his ferocious rejection of the request for aid to Ukraine makes him culpable for the deaths of millions of people in the famine of the late 1940s. Cases of cannibalism occurred. The experience seared itself into Khrushchëv’s consciousness. He had come to understand the idiotic brutality of the Soviet economic order. Stalin was incapable of such a reaction. Like Lenin, he hated any sign of what he regarded as sentimentality; and both Lenin and Stalin tended in the first instance to assume that any reports of rural hardship were the product of peasants tricking urban authorities into indulging them.17
Not that Stalin and his central subordinates controlled everything. They concentrated on restoring authority over those sectors of state and society where authority had prevailed before 1941. Sometimes, but not always, this involved a shift in the content of policy. Yet this hardly makes it sensible to call this a period of ‘high Stalinism’ even though several Western scholars have liked to claim that the post-war years were unique. In fact Stalin’s actions were mostly reactionary: he was reverting the Soviet order to the template he had more or less imposed before Operation Barbarossa. Yet society in Russia and its borderlands had never been completely regulated by the Kremlin. The old amalgam of regimentation and chaos persisted. Several groups in society were more overt in asserting their wishes than before the war. Most obvious, of course, were the partisans in the newly annexed territories in the west of the USSR. The Gulag too was no longer quiescent. The arrest of Ukrainian and Baltic dissenters introduced into the labour camps anintransigent element, sustained by religious faith and national pride, which had hardly been noticed in the Gulag complex before the war.
If a totalitarian state could not stop protests and strikes in its detention zones, something was wrong – and several of the Kremlin leaders were aware of this even if they kept the knowledge secret from Stalin. The unrest in the Gulag happened despite the intensification of repressive campaigns. Even in the more established parts of the USSR there were aspects of belief and behaviour which remained stubbornly unamenable to political manipulation. The coercive agencies in the war had concentrated their efforts on eradicating defeatism. Yet many people, especially youngsters, simply wanted to get on with their personal lives without the state’s interference. Western music and, in some instances, even Western clothes fashions were adopted by young people.18 The alienation of Muscovite students in particular was pronounced. And skilled workers also refused to be gulled by official propaganda; they knew their value to industrial enterprises which were under instructions to raise production sharply. Labour discipline, no longer backed by legal sanctions as severe as in the pre-war years, was seldom enforceable.
It was dangerous to present Stalin with reports on phenomena which he might blame on the person who was reporting. His associates censored themselves in communication with him.19 He ruled through the institutions and appointees he himself had put in place. He never visited a factory, farm or shop in the post-war years (apart from a trip to a market in Sukhum; this had also been no different in the 1930s).20 He received no visitors from outside the political milieu except for the brief sojourn of his childhood friends at one of his Black Sea dachas.21 He experienced the USSR and the world communist movement on paper in the form of decrees, reports and denunciations. He could not know everything.
Stalin’s inability to eradicate apathy, chaos and disobedience continued. His was the primary responsibility for the decision to deliver a blow against popular aspirations to some permanent relaxation of the Soviet order. Assumptions that changes would be put in hand at the end of the war were crudely disappointed. The question arises of whether the life of workers, kolkhozniks and administrators would have been radically different if Stalin had died at the moment of military victory. The answer can only be guessed at, but it is difficult to see how such a regime could have remained in power if it had failed to continue to apply severe repression. The ruin of cities, villages and whole economic sectors placed a vast burden on the state budget. Things were made worse by securityconcerns. The race to develop nuclear weaponry was bound to be extremely costly for the Soviet Union. Although friendly diplomatic relations with the USA and even American financial assistance could have alleviated the situation, the essential problem would have remained: society below the level of the central and local elites was therefore likely to be asked to shoulder the burden in the form of a delay in improving living conditions – and without the Gulag and the security police agencies this was a situation which could not have been maintained.22
Stalin’s associates needed to conserve the powers of repression if they wanted to survive. The moderation of many policies was not excluded by this; and in fact his associates quietly suggested a number of modifications to economic, national and foreign policy. But none of them was a procedural democrat or an advocate of a market economy. Stalin had them in personal thrall. But it was not just his terrifying nature which stopped radical reform from being attempted. The Soviet order had its own internal imperatives. It had never been as adaptive as capitalist societies in the West, and the conditions after the Second World War rendered its inflexibilities stronger than ever. Stalinism would outlast Stalin.