PART III

Winning the Peace

CHAPTER 6

A Pyrrhic Victory?

The paradoxical character of Stalin’s policies during the war stems from the nature of the abrupt shifts that they represented. All the major belligerents in the conflict were obliged in one way or another to adjust the themes of their prewar public pronouncements and modify their political tactics in rallying their people. But in Stalin’s case the shifts amounted to a rehabilitation of individuals and restoration of traditions, belief systems and institutions that had been rejected or denounced as inimical to the building of socialism. To be sure, the reversals were selective. For all the mass of documentation compiled by the ubiquitous security services, and the flood of memoirs and personal testimonies of citizens and émigrés, the question remains how successful this seismic shift was in mobilizing the mass of the population. Opinions differ.¹ One conclusion seems inescapable. The invasion and occupation, accompanied by extreme brutality, brought together in a common cause for the first time in the Soviet era the mass of the population and the party leadership personified by Stalin. He and his associates were able to channel the spontaneous upsurge of patriotism, resorting less than before the war to coercive means of mobilizing the population without ever giving them up. But it was enough to arouse great expectations for the postwar era, in terms of greater freedom of expression, relaxation of punitive measures to force obedience in the factory and the farm and continuation of tolerance for the Patriarchal Orthodox Church. Among foreign communists, the abolition of the Comintern, alliance with progressive forces in capitalist countries and fewer directives from the Moscow centre fostered the illusion that the Soviet model, so alien to the societies of Europe, would not be imposed upon them even when they took power. All these effects made it more difficult, paradoxically, for Stalin to reassert his control at home and within the international communist movement in order to renew the march to socialism in one country.

COUNTING THE LOSSES

The Soviet Union emerged as one of the principal victors from the ordeal of the Second World War, but the human and material costs inflicted by the enemy, and self-inflicted as a result of Stalin’s leadership, may well have proved irreparable. No other state in modern history has survived the enormous losses in men, military equipment and productive capacity inflicted upon the Soviet Union during the first two years of the war, which were followed by a painful recovery sufficient only to defeat the enemy. In the first few months of wartime, the gross value of production fell by more than half, from 12 to 5.6 billion rubles. The Germans overran enterprises producing 71 per cent of Soviet pig iron and 60 per cent of steel, not to speak for the moment of agricultural losses in livestock and equipment. The figures continued to mount throughout the war at a terrifying rate. The most complete set of measurements now available has been calculated and summarized by Mark Harrison and G.V. Kirilenko. They do not differ substantially.² The losses of military equipment and weaponry were staggering. Of the 131,700 tanks from the prewar stocks, wartime production and Lend-Lease, over 73 per cent were destroyed, as well as 65 per cent of military aircraft and almost half the artillery. The size of the Soviet army at the end of the war was deceptive; its weaponry and equipment were obsolete compared to the Western armies, including the Wehrmacht, but the Germans had banked too heavily on technological innovations which could not be produced in sufficient quantity or with adequate lead time for testing under battlefield conditions.³

The estimated total of material losses of the war can be broken down into several categories, the critical one being direct losses of physical assets on occupied territory. The Soviet figures total 679 billion rubles, or about 30 per cent of national wealth. Destruction engulfed the homes of 25 million people, ruined 1,710 towns and cities, almost 32,000 industrial establishments and over 65,000 kilometres of railway lines. Harrison suggests that some of these figures may have been inflated in order to influence Western policy on reparations and credits for reconstruction. But his estimate of 25 per cent of the losses of prewar fixed assets is still devastating.

Demographic losses are even more controversial. Estimates have steadily increased from Stalin’s low figure of 7 million to Gorbachev’s over 25 million premature deaths. Because of the problem of whether to count emigration in the total, as well as the difficulties of measurement, Harrison arrives at an estimate of population losses of between 26.6 and 29.3 million, of which 7.8 were military.⁴ Major problems in arriving at an accurate figure for military deaths remain insoluble. According to an order of the Commissariat of Defence in 1940, documents personally identifying soldiers and non-commissioned officers were abolished. Stalin admitted this was an error and ordered them restored. But technical problems relating to photographing millions of soldiers delayed the process. Beyond this, the rapid withdrawals and encirclements made it impossible to collect and identify the dead. Mass burials became the norm, often mixing German and Soviet dead. Similar problems occurred in counting deaths from wounds. Records for over 32 million soldiers treated in hospitals did not give information on the outcome of their stay. Many of the records were destroyed in the course of the fighting.⁵ Consequently, estimates of the war dead fluctuate greatly. One Soviet scholar came up with the figure of 8.5 million killed in action and 2.5 million dead from wounds.⁶ The burden on the state budget of support of veterans and their dependents cost the state an estimated 2 billion rubles as late as 1963, which represented about 12 per cent of the defence budget.⁷

The long-term demographic disaster can best be measured by declining fertility rates. The overall loss of 35 million people to war-related deaths, emigration and birth deficit ‘was either not made up or continued to increase indefinitely throughout the postwar period’.⁸ The disproportionate losses of men and women further impaired a postwar recovery. The imbalance was particularly striking in the countryside. In 1940 the proportion of women to men was 1.1:1; in 1945 it was 2.7:1. Over the next five years the number of children born out of wedlock ranged from 752,000 to 944,000. A large percentage of adolescents who had been employed in industry as the adult male population was drained for the front suffered from debilitating diseases.⁹ The combination of wartime losses and the famine created long-term health problems and helps to explain the decline in life expectancy observed as late as the Brezhnev period.¹⁰

Whatever the exact figures, which will probably never be known, Harrison and Kirilenko reach the sobering conclusion that the wartime losses of population and fixed assets were permanent. Although the prewar levels of GNP and population were restored, ‘the Soviet Union never returned to its prewar economic trajectory’.

The war had a devastating effect on the agricultural population. The collective farms suffered from a massive labour shortage due to conscription into the army and the Nazi policy in the occupied territories of deporting Ostarbeiter for forced labour in German factories. Demobilization did not bring large numbers of former peasants back to the land, even though there was large-scale unemployment in the cities after the war.¹¹ Almost 65 per cent of the demobilized veterans who had manned the machine-tractor stations did not return to their jobs. Agricultural equipment wore out without being repaired or replaced by new machinery as factories were devoting their production to armaments. The number of motor vehicles on the collective farms declined from 107,000 before the war to 5,000 in 1945. All major sources of food, from grain to sugar beet, suffered a massive decline.¹² There were insufficient food stocks in the state warehouses, and increases in the number of people on rationing drove up the price of food until Stalin was persuaded to reduce grain procurements and cut the number of people with ration coupons.¹³ These measures were inadequate to cope with the natural disaster brought on by drought and bad weather, creating famine conditions in 1946 and 1947.

It is much more difficult to arrive at any general conclusions about the psychological impact of the war on the domestic population, on the individual men and women who fought, suffered or sought to opt out of the conflict in hope of surviving a cataclysm in which they perceived no preferable outcome.¹⁴ Scholars have examined different social groups as they emerged from the wartime experiences: the front-line fighters, the youth too young to fight, women, nationalities, those living under occupation, others who endured deportation. The picture is one of deep psychological disorientation and disillusionment.¹⁵

Was this then a Pyrrhic victory? However the term Pyrrhic victory has been applied in the history of warfare, it has retained a paradoxical meaning. In the case of the Great Fatherland War, the contrasting elements emerge with striking clarity. There was no viable alternative to winning the war; losing it meant the dismemberment of the state and enslavement if not annihilation of the Russian people. But Stalin’s leadership in preparing for the war, fighting it and rebuilding the country exacted a terrible price with serious long-term damage to the economy, population growth and, ultimately, the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union and the political system it had imposed on Eastern Europe. Moreover, as the war drew to a close, a plethora of serious problems added to the burden of recovering the human and material losses.

CIVIL WAR IN THE BORDERLANDS

The fruits of victory began to spoil even before they had been picked. The first crisis erupted in the form of resistance to the re-Sovietization of the territories occupied by the Axis powers. Civil war had broken out in the Baltic republics, Belarus and Western Ukraine, where nationalist bands fought the partisans and assassinated returning Soviet officials.¹⁶ In former Soviet Western Ukraine and the newly annexed territories, the re-Sovietization took the form of a brutal mobilization. After the passage of the Red Army, three repressive agencies, NKVD border forces, blocking detachments and Soviet partisans, swarmed through the region. Only then did party officials begin to appear in the form of operative groups to re-establish the obkom, kraikom and gorkom structures (regional, district and city committees). Defectors from nationalist bands were organized into fake detachments of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, dressed and equipped like the insurgents. Punitive detachments of special NKVD units called operative groups of militia conducted sweeps through the villages, arresting and deporting without much discrimination. At the same time, teams of judicial officials were sent in to mobilize, register and screen the local population. Clearly these punitive measures were not well co-ordinated and the population was repeatedly subjected to arbitrary and cruel treatment. Khrushchev with Stalin’s approval set up a troika of the local party secretary, head of the regional NKVD and regional prosecutor to better co-ordinate these measures. But criticism from the Central Committee continued to focus on the poor performance of local party officials. Periodically Moscow resorted to amnesties and in February 1946 elections to the Supreme Soviet were held in what still amounted to a war zone.¹⁷ Although the large bands were broken up in Ukraine by the end of the war, six months later Moscow still considered it necessary to deploy 20,000 NKVD troops, 10,000 supply troops and 26,000 locally recruited militia against the insurgents.¹⁸

Elsewhere, the fighting against the nationalist bands also lasted for months, even years in the case of the Lithuanian ‘forest brothers’. This term for partisans was first applied in 1905 to bands fighting against the tsarist government and it was revived in 1945 by the anti-Soviet underground partisans opposing the reoccupation of Lithuania by the Red Army after the Germans surrendered. Even before the end of the war Beria was already raising the old bugbear of foreign intervention, writing to Stalin that although the Lithuanian Liberation Army had been ‘partially destroyed, it is counting on a new war of the USSR against England and the US and is preparing for a rising in the rear of the Red Army’.¹⁹

Problems had arisen also in the southern borderlands. There Stalin resorted to the most brutal measures. He imposed a verdict of collective guilt on those nationalities which had shown signs of defection or else where it was anticipated. At Beria’s instigation he ordered the deportation to Central Asia of 180,000 Crimean Tatars from their autonomous republic in the Crimea. In rapid order the same measure was carried out against the entire population of the Kabardino-Balkarian Autonomous Republic and the entire Chechen and Ingush peoples from the North Caucasus.²⁰ In these three cases archival documents reveal split loyalties and fighters on both sides, though the proportions show an advantage for the Soviet side.²¹ However, there was no evidence of ‘bandit activity’ at all to justify the mass deportation of 90,000–100,000 Meskhetian Turks (Islamicized Georgians) or the smaller numbers of Turks, Kurds and Khemshins (Armenian Muslims), none of whom had been occupied by the German army.²² Beria initiated most of these operations in order to enhance his own power in the region by discrediting local party and Komsomol cadres under his control by playing on Stalin’s fears over the potential defection of Soviet nationalities sharing a common frontier with the same or similar ethnic and religious societies. Stalin’s nationality policy expressed in the brotherhood of nations was left in shambles.

The war uprooted vast numbers of Soviet citizens, producing what Lewis Siegelbaum has called the migratory ‘flood’ of 1945. He counts five streams in the process of dislocation that ‘paradoxically afforded a degree of manoeuvrability, if not freedom of movement, that well-nigh overwhelmed the state and its functioning’. First, there were the resettlers, deportees and returnees, including half a million Ukrainian deportees and large numbers of Crimean Tatars and North Caucasus nationalities; second, there were the demobilized soldiers and amnestied prisoners, who numbered about 7.5 million by 1947; third, there were the returning prisoners of war, about 2 million, and 3 million Ostarbeiter, forced labourers sent to Germany to work. Fourth, 10 million–17 million Soviet citizens who had been evacuated to the east sought to return home, often to devastated towns, villages and heavily damaged cities like Kiev. Finally, there were the ‘itinerants’ living on the margins of a war-torn society. They had always been a familiar phenomenon in pre-revolutionary Russia, where they were known as ‘wanderers’, and then reappeared in the early Soviet years, slipping through the nets of state control and registration.²³ Stalin’s prewar population policies set in motion a mass movement of peasants and workers in the construction of a socialist order, while at the same time striving to fix in place millions of others to prevent disorder and to guarantee a steady flow of food supplies into the cities. The flood of the postwar years was wholly disruptive and required a different set of controls, involving untold numbers of party members, bureaucrats and police in sorting out the productive from the potentially asocial or pernicious elements and re-assimilating them into a socialist system.

In addition to restoring order, Stalin and his associates faced problems not unlike those which during the civil war and intervention of a generation earlier had bedevilled the nascent Soviet regime. But the difference lay in re-establishing rather than creating the major props holding up the entire system. The party was in disarray; the schools in a parlous condition; the collective farm system in a shambles; wayward tendencies in the intelligentsia abounded; the industrial plan was in need of conversion from military exigencies to a civilian economy. All these problems cried out for immediate solution from a leader who was worn out by the extreme demands of war and brooding over real and imaginary conspiracies and the question of his succession.

At the end of the war Stalin was at the peak of his power and international reputation. But his health was precarious and the problems he faced were multiple and ultimately intractable. His private life showed the signs of the wear and tear of wartime. His relations with his children had deteriorated to the point where they were alienated, and close personal relations with his oldest comrades were frayed or broken.²⁴ Contemporary accounts portray him as worn out by the exigencies of supreme command. During the war, he had worked tirelessly, often sixteen hours a day. He had devoted his attention to every major aspect of governance as well as the conduct of military operations, for better or worse; at first worse, but increasingly for better as the war went on. He had personally supervised negotiations first with Nazi Germany and Japan, and then at meetings with representatives of the Western powers. He had abolished the Comintern as a policy-making body in 1943, preferring to deal separately with the leaders of each communist party, advising, correcting, lecturing and intimidating them as he saw fit. These meetings placed an additional strain on his energy.

Stalin may have suffered a slight stroke at the end of the war. In any case, in October 1945 he took his first vacation to the Black Sea in several years. From then on, the vacations grew longer and his temper grew shorter. He appears to have reverted to his prewar mental state, yet, as we shall see, there is a danger in placing exclusive emphasis on his destructive impulses. To be sure, he displayed dark suspicions that the leading elements in society, who had devoted themselves so wholeheartedly to winning the war, might endeavour to expand the relative autonomy they had enjoyed during the war, and he was concerned about rebuilding his own cult. At the same time, he did not revert completely to the mass repression of the thirties. As Kaganovich suggested, there were many Stalins, and the postwar period revealed another one.

Stalin quickly dashed hopes nurtured by wide sections of the population, especially the elites, that he might institute reforms based on a greater participation in the process of governance by those groups which had proven their loyalty. Instead, he reverted to prewar methods of centralization and mobilization, though he modified their application to fit the new circumstances. Stalin’s first organizational moves suggested a thorough overhauling of the emergency wartime administration. The GOKO was abolished, but fundamental changes in the wartime structure of governance did not follow. The centralization of power remained intact. The Council of People’s Commissars – or rather its Orgburo – virtually reproduced the membership of GOKO. The marshals were dropped; in retrospect the first move in reducing the political role of the military. Periodic meetings of the Politburo were reintroduced and then allowed to peter out. On domestic policy, he relied on an informal inner circle of close associates as well as a secondary layer of administrators, generals and former Comintern officials.²⁵ His personal style of governing hardly changed at all, except that intra-party rivalries grew sharper. He encouraged this institutional instability by moving around members of his inner circle from position to position, promoting, demoting and restoring them to their former posts seemingly at random. If there was any rhyme or reason to these moves, it was to prevent any one of them from assuming that he was the heir apparent.²⁶

MANAGING THE MILITARY

During the war, Stalin had generously recognized and rewarded his military commanders, lavishing praise, medals and promotions on them; by 1943 he had given his marshals increasing freedom of planning and executing operations while not surrendering his monopoly of making final decisions. But he was quick to reproach or remove those generals who had failed at the front, especially during the disasters of 1941. The senior officers liberated at the end of the war, often by the Americans because of the location of their camps, were forced to undergo intensive interrogation and often torture at the hands of Viktor Abakumov and the agents of his SMERSH (the Counterintelligence Section of the Commissariat of Defence, its name a portmanteau of ‘Death to Spies’). Those who could demonstrate that they had surrendered only after being surrounded or wounded were allowed to return to the army after strenuous retraining. The others, including General Vlasov, were condemned and shot. About one half of the returning rank-and-file soldiers were incarcerated.²⁷ Was it any wonder that Stalin did not permit the formation of any veterans’ associations? One was finally formed in 1956.

The bigger question was to what extent was Stalin willing to share the accolades of victory? When it became apparent that he was not physically able to lead the victory parade on horseback, he entrusted the honour to Zhukov who was portrayed everywhere as the man on the white horse. As the conqueror of Berlin, the commander of the most powerful army in Europe, and the Soviet representative on the Allied Control Council of Germany with Eisenhower and Montgomery, he enjoyed enormous popularity at home and great international prestige. Unfortunately, he could not resist adopting a posture in Berlin which aroused Stalin’s suspicion. Zhukov appeared to have been acting in ways that may have reminded Stalin, who often thought in terms of historical analogies, of the officers in the Russian army of occupation in Paris in 1815, who returned home to become the leaders of the Decembrist Uprising against the tsar.²⁸ There was plenty of evidence available to him from the military censors of the discontent among the veterans with the mismanagement and corruption accompanying demobilization and relocation after the war, which they blamed on the ‘rear-line rats’ in the bureaucracy and party.²⁹

With this background in mind, Stalin called Zhukov when he returned to Berlin from a meeting of the Supreme Soviet in March 1946 suggesting that, since Eisenhower and Montgomery were being called back home from Berlin, wasn’t it also time for Zhukov to leave? Stalin called again a few days later to inform him that the Politburo had decided to replace him in Berlin with Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky, to abolish Zhukov’s position as first deputy minister of defence and supreme commander and to appoint General Nikolai Bulganin as deputy minister, with fewer responsibilities. Despite his rank, Bulganin had never served as a front-line commander, knew little about military affairs and was regarded with disdain by the officer corps. Marshal A.M. Vasilevsky, meanwhile, was named chief of staff. What was left for Zhukov? Stalin offered him the new position of commander of ground forces, a clear demotion, the first in a series of steps to whittle down his prestige and influence. His new duties were limited to administrative matters and he soon clashed with Bulganin over defining the dispositions of the top military posts. Reporting to Stalin, Bulganin distorted Zhukov’s proposals to make them appear to increase his own authority.

The next cut came with the sudden arrest of the brilliant minister of the Soviet Air Forces, Marshal Aleksandr Novikov, a close friend and associate of Zhukov during the war. This signalled the commencement of the Aviators Affair, concocted by Abakumov, the rising star of the security services. Originally a protégé of Beria, Abakumov had been rapidly promoted during the war. He became head of SMERSH, with agents stationed down to the regimental level including the activities of Red Army officers. By 1943 he had already placed thirty-five generals under arrest; by the end of the war the list grew to over 100, of whom at least seventy-six were condemned by military tribunals. Egged on by Stalin, he reported that Novikov had given evidence of Zhukov’s disloyal attitude.³⁰ On the basis of this testimony, Stalin summoned the Supreme Military Council with the participation of the Soviet marshals and members of the Politburo to review a document accusing Zhukov of the most serious crimes. At the same time, arrests were made of top military and civilian officers associated with Zhukov. Stalin showed up wearing his prewar military tunic, a sign that he was in a belligerent mood. Accounts differ on specific details of the meeting. But there is no disagreement on the reaction of the main speakers. Stalin called first on the marshals, who with one exception denied that Zhukov had at any time behaved unpatriotically or disloyally to Stalin, although they criticized certain personal characteristics. Members of the Politburo, mentioned differently in different accounts, supported the accusations.³¹ Never before had such a clear divide opened up between the top military and party leaders. Stalin then issued an order listing Zhukov’s many errors: his personal ambition; his dissatisfaction with insufficient government appreciation of his military achievements and personal worth; his false and immodest claims to have planned and carried out the entire major victorious operations in the Great Fatherland War; his protection of disaffected officers under his command. By a unanimous verdict of the Supreme Military Council, Stalin concluded, Zhukov was relieved of his position as commander of ground forces and named commander of the Odessa military district. In light of the seriousness of the accusations and the arrest of other officers, the fact that Zhukov was not arrested is striking.³²

It is most likely that Stalin was unwilling to ignore – still less challenge – the united front of the marshals. Moreover, Zhukov’s popularity at home and status abroad offered some protection. Although Abakumov considered Zhukov ‘a dangerous man’, a second Tukhachevsky, he could not provide evidence that linked Zhukov to a foreign conspiracy. Stalin was not about to decapitate the officer corps as in 1937. The marshals had demonstrated their loyalty and there was no evidence that they nourished secret ambitions. What was different then, as would become increasingly clear in other such ‘affairs’, was that Stalin’s vindictiveness was selective – paradoxical, unjust and vicious as it was. Abakumov continued to pursue Zhukov, sending Stalin material revealing Zhukov’s extensive looting of valuables from Germany, which he shipped home in seven railway carriages. After another investigation, Zhukov was re-assigned to the even more remote Urals military district. Then, suddenly, in 1953, Stalin recalled him to Moscow. Presumably Stalin was by this time confident that Zhukov, having been relegated to years of obscurity, was no longer a threat; now it was the turn of the security services. Abakumov had already been arrested in 1951 and now even Beria was under suspicion.³³

In contrast to the military, the Communist Party had suffered a serious loss of effectiveness and prestige during the war. Rebuilding it ranked high in Stalin’s agenda to restore the balance among Soviet institutions upset by the war. The party’s controls over propaganda had slackened during the war. Theoretical training had been weakened by substituting for the classics the study on a massive scale from the end of 1943 of Stalin’s On the Great Fatherland War of the Soviet Union, which was taught in a mechanical and dogmatic way.³⁴ At the end of the war, Zhdanov admitted that the leadership recognized that ‘there were serious shortcomings and serious failures’ in the ideological sphere.³⁵ Reflecting on the postwar years, Dmitry Shepilov, deputy head of the Agitprop Department at the time, later wrote that under conditions where an aureole of glory surrounded ‘the triumphal victory of the USSR in the Second World War, it became all too clear that in the field of ideology there was a series of sectors which did not correspond to the victorious era and its glory’.³⁶ To correct the situation, the party poured forth a stream of documents on the need to sustain Soviet patriotism.³⁷ This campaign was bolstered by another aimed at improving the level and range of Soviet propaganda in the country and abroad.³⁸ All these instructions came as the direct result of ‘the orders of Comrade Stalin on the improvement of propaganda and agitation’.³⁹ According to Shepilov, these were edited by Stalin at meetings of the Politburo or the secretariat of the Central Committee or by telephone and frequently in unofficial conversations.⁴⁰ Stalin also took an active part in initiating harsh censorship of the foreign press and literature.⁴¹ It was not surprising, then, that the Agitprop Department routinely rejected requests of Soviet scholars for access to the closed funds of libraries and institutes containing ‘banned’ books and periodicals.⁴² Stalin went to great lengths to conceal his instructions from the public.

On the international level the quality of party propaganda had also suffered with the need to shift from advocating capitalist encirclement to linking defence of the fatherland to the alliance with the West. Here too a paradoxical situation prevailed at the very moment of victory. As the chief representative of the Sovinform wrote from London: ‘During the war, the chief Soviet propagandist in England was the Red Army on whose tanks the Soviet word was carried forward loud and clear’. But peace turned the asset into a major liability as stories circulated in the Western press about the brutalities and rapes committed by the same heroic Red Army. The situation deteriorated rapidly. In October 1945, Solomon Lozovsky, head of Sovinformburo, sent a special memorandum – ‘The Allied Campaign to Discredit the Red Army’ – to his chief, Molotov, and to Malenkov, in which he criticized the passive Soviet response to what had become a worldwide campaign of abuse.⁴³ It was more than passive: ‘it was inept, confused and fragmented’. But the leadership had no good advice on how to combat the Western propaganda offensive. One problem was Stalin’s unwillingness to reveal the true extent of the Soviet losses for fear this would convey a picture of weakness, instead of demonstrating the disproportionate sacrifice of the Soviet people in the Allied cause of defeating Nazism.

The heavy war losses among the party cadres due to casualties and purges of those who had spent any time in the occupied territories were made up numerically by a vast influx of youth, many of whom were peasants, hastily recruited, without the normal course of prewar instruction in Marxism-Leninism.⁴⁴ The leadership faced a situation similar to that after the civil war, when revolutionary cadres drawn from the working class had been much reduced, forcing them to create a virtually new party composed initially of inexperienced and badly educated activists. Problems of recruiting and training a new generation after 1945 were compounded by the massive destabilizing effects of the war on Soviet youth.⁴⁵ Rapid promotion during the war to fill losses at the front thrust men into positions for which they were inadequately prepared. After the war, obkom secretaries were routinely removed if they did not measure up to the educational standards expected of them, and then sent to the Higher Party School in Moscow for further instruction. Reforms were drafted to raise the ideological awareness of the leading party officials in the national and autonomous republics, including reorganization of the curricula in the party schools preparing future cadres.⁴⁶ Along similar lines, Stalin issued instructions to introduce greater specialization into the party organs in the Soviet republics.⁴⁷ Substantial efforts were also made to improve the standard of living of party members by introducing substantial increases in their pay, food allotments and health benefits.⁴⁸ To cope with the new demands, Stalin expanded the number of official positions within the party hierarchy to over 45,000 by the end of his life and loaded them down with additional duties. Although he remained highly suspicious and arbitrarily intervened in party affairs, he refrained from returning to massive repression as a means of imposing his will. With a few notable exceptions, to be recounted later in this chapter, discipline was generally maintained by reprimands, demotions or dismissal from office rather than arrests, trials, imprisonment and shootings.

Evidence of Stalin’s attempts to establish stability within the party can be drawn from the pattern of longevity in office of the first secretaries of the national and autonomous republics, again with the notable exception of the Russian Republic. In Armenia Gregor Arutinov occupied the post of first secretary of the republic from 1937 to 1954; in Latvia it was Jānis Kalnbērziņš from 1940 to 1959; in Lithuania, Antanas Sniečkus from 1940 to 1974; in Kazakhstan, Zhumbai Shaiakhmetov, from 1946 to 1954; in Tajikistan, Bobojon Ghafurov from 1946 to 1956; in Uzbekistan, U.Iu. Iusupov served from 1937 until 1950 when he was appointed minister of cotton production of the USSR and was replaced by A.I. Niiazov, who had worked closely with Iusupov in the Council of Ministers and Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of Uzbekistan. A large number of first secretaries of the autonomous republics – including the North Ossetian, Tatar, Bashkir, Tuvan, Chuvash and Dagestan – held their posts up to the death of Stalin.⁴⁹

Two of Stalin’s favourites, Nicolae Coval and Leonid Brezhnev, served as first secretary of the Moldavian party from 1946 to 1950 and from 1950 to 1952 respectively, despite upheavals caused by deportation and re-Sovietization.⁵⁰ Two striking examples illustrate how survival was achieved in the face of serious attacks from within the system. In Armenia, Arutiunov refuted a number of serious accusations, issuing from the Orgburo and signed by Zhdanov, including shortcomings in the ideological training of party cadres and the study of Russian.⁵¹ Mir Jafar Baghirov, the first secretary of the Azerbaijan party from 1933 to 1953, withstood the onslaught of none other than Lev Mekhlis, the commissar of state control, by invoking Stalin’s intervention and a review by a high-level group of party stalwarts. Not only was Baghirov exonerated, but the Politburo imposed new limitations on the rights of the commissariat and its local representatives to investigate the activities of central and regional departments.⁵²

The situation in Georgia was more complicated. A Stalin favourite, Kandid Charkviani, was first secretary of the Georgian party from 1938 to 1952, consorting with Beria until he was caught up in the so-called Mingrelian Affair. Although accused of tolerating criminal activity, he was demoted but never arrested and assigned to a minor post in the Central Committee. Akaki Mgeladze, another Stalin favourite, was first secretary of the Abkhazian Communist Party from 1943 to 1951 and then succeeded Charkviani in Georgia from 1952 to 1953. He turned Stalin against Charkviani but was dismissed by Beria after Stalin’s death. He was never arrested, retained his party membership and occupied a minor position in Abkhazia after Beria was purged.⁵³

Running parallel to his policy of restoring and even enhancing the role of the party, Stalin introduced what amounted to countervailing changes which had the result of reducing its effectiveness. First and foremost were his decisions to increase surveillance over the activities of the party down to the lowest level. He expanded the network of reporting agencies, including roving inspectors of the Central Committee, representatives of the procurator’s office and local committees of party control. The security services represent another and, alas, less well-documented channel of communication; indirect evidence suggests their surveillance was extensive and growing over time. Finally, to provide a recurring source of self-criticism, the first secretaries of the obkoms and kraikoms were expected to submit periodic reports as well.⁵⁴ This massive system of surveillance generated a flood of information which was used to expose abuses in the system.⁵⁵ One of the most prominent themes to emerge from the available documentation was the denunciation of widespread failings by local party organizations to maintain ‘Bolshevik’ standards of behaviour, including arbitrary interference in local life, drunkenness, absenteeism, licentiousness, corruption, dereliction of duty and similar peccadilloes. The inadvertent – indeed paradoxical – effect was a reflex action in the form of the growth and strengthening of clientele networks.⁵⁶

Clientelism had been an integral part of the Soviet system since the civil war.⁵⁷ The system had evolved from the early days of that conflict, deriving from the nature of party work and personal interests operating in an environment of deprivation. Stalin hijacked the system by making provincial party secretaries his personal appointees as a means of consolidating power. Yet, paradoxically, the system began to act as a form of insulating local party cliques against pressure from the centre. Stalin reacted strongly. At the March plenum of the Central Committee in 1937 he denounced the practice of selecting workers, ‘not by objective criteria, but by accidental, subjective, narrow and provincial criteria. Most frequently so-called acquaintances are chosen, personal friends, fellow countrymen . . . [who] eulogize each other and from time to time send empty, nauseating reports to the centre about success’. In citing examples, Stalin ominously declared that ‘such practices sought to create for themselves conditions of a certain independence both toward local people and the Central Committee of the Party’.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, the practice continued and spread under the pressure of wartime conditions.⁵⁹

A second major factor in diminishing the leading role of the party in Soviet society was indirectly related to Stalin’s policy of mobilizing the economy to meet the demands of war. As Moshe Lewin has stressed, these emergency measures introduced deep structural changes that persisted in the postwar period. During the war, the directors of enterprises tended to deal directly with the appropriate ministries (formerly commissariats) which were managing the battle for production. This shift accelerated the division of labour already under way in the prewar period between the economic bureaucrats in the ministries and the party cadres. The overall effect was twofold. First, the party was turned more and more into an appendix of the ministries, leading to its loss of power. Second, the bureaucracy expanded to swollen proportions, deprived of a central co-ordinating body and increasingly impervious to reform.⁶⁰ To facilitate rapid fulfilment of orders and access to raw materials, the ministries resorted to the practice of premirovanie, variously translated as ‘payoff’ or ‘bonus’, but sometimes closer to a bribe.⁶¹ Whatever the definition, the practice was illegal and in the postwar period the leading party organs made strenuous efforts to eliminate it. The Central Committee denounced such rewards as reducing party officials to the ‘playthings’ of the enterprises, ‘shameful and ruinous’, depriving them of their independence.⁶² It was partly in response to these examples of malfeasance that a new scale of payment for party secretaries was introduced.⁶³

THE COLLECTIVE FARMS IN CRISIS

Possibly the most flagrant shortcoming of the party came to light in the failure to restore the collective farm system, which had been devastated by the war. In the immediate postwar years, the collective farm system throughout the Soviet Union showed signs of being in grave danger of collapse. During the war a moral rot had set in and persisted in the postwar years. The crisis was fully documented in a wide-ranging survey of sixty regions and 288 collective farms prepared by Lev Mekhlis for Beria in August 1945. It painted a grim picture of frequent violations of social norms and regulations, the squandering and plundering of socialist property and the failure of the responsible party and state agencies to correct the abuses. Mekhlis stated at the outset that in some regions ‘anti-governmental practices’ had reached the point where they represented a threat to the future development of the socialist system and the well-being of the collective farmers. He blamed the local authorities for having failed in their duties to educate the kolkhozniki in the collective spirit of the Kolkhoz Statute of 1935, and, worse, for having themselves flagrantly violated the policies of the party and the government. He selected four areas where abuses appeared most frequently: the arbitrary requisition of kolkhoz resources for all kinds of enterprises that had nothing to do with the operation of the farms, including outright embezzlement of funds and the construction of buildings for other agencies; confiscation of kolkhoz buildings without compensation for other uses; seizure of cattle by local officials for their own use; expropriation of kolkhoz labour for other purposes. The kolkhoz accounts were often in such disarray that these rip-offs were easily concealed.⁶⁴

At the same time, Andreev, the president of the Council on Kolkhoz Affairs and a Politburo member, received a flood of letters from individual members of collective farms throughout the Soviet Union, many of them disabled veterans of the war, relating the most poignant details of their exploitation or mistreatment.⁶⁵ The situation reached such crisis proportions that the council reported to Malenkov in June 1949 that a mass of letters had been received from individual members of kolkhozes documenting their persecution for having complained in writing about violations of the Kolkhoz Statute. Investigations had determined that the overwhelming number of these violations had been confirmed. Punishment of these whistleblowers extended from confiscation of livestock to fines, sentences of corrective labour and even exclusion from the kolkhozes. Despite instructions from the council, the Ministry of Justice and the chief procurator, the abuses had not been corrected, and Malenkov was requested to intervene personally.⁶⁶ These appeals apparently went unheeded: the complaints by individuals citing flagrant violations of the law on collectives continued into the 1950s.⁶⁷

The decay of the kolkhoz system was also due in no small measure to the resistance of the peasantry to collective labour and their stubborn but rational adherence to archaic practices.⁶⁸ During the war, when surveillance over the countryside had diminished, the peasantry began to under-report the amount of land under collective cultivation in order to reduce taxes and to cut out land from the collective and join it to their individual plots. This led to a decrease in the time the peasants spent on the collective as well as reducing its productivity.⁶⁹ As late as 1952 the government was still trying to recover this land.⁷⁰ An equally venerable tradition shows up in the persistent retention and defence of small kolkhozes in the face of pressures to join larger ones in the interests of efficiency. The rationale behind this was, of course, the preservation of the enlarged family or dvor wherein members of the kolkhoz were all related, thus defeating the basic ‘spirit’ of the law and the socialist ideal.⁷¹ Thus from above and below the collective ideal was being subverted.

Agriculture was struggling to recover prewar levels of production when natural disaster struck. The famine of 1946–47 condemned 1 million–1.5 million people to death. During the war, famine conditions had occurred in widely scattered localities from Siberia in the north to the Kazakh and Uzbek republics. A good harvest in 1945 promised a modest recovery. But a severe drought in 1946 plunged the entire country into a devastating famine which reached a peak in 1947 and did not abate in some regions until several years later.⁷² Caused by a severe drought in the western regions, it struck an already hungry and highly vulnerable population, weakened by the effects of the war years.

The situation in the recently annexed territories and throughout Western Ukraine was especially dire. In his reports to Stalin in 1948, Khrushchev, the first secretary of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, identified three major problems facing the introduction or restoration of the collective farm system. There still existed, three to four years after the Germans had been cleared from Soviet territory, widespread instances of dissolution, corruption and shirking on the part of kolkhoz members, dating back to the prewar period. Khrushchev provided vivid details of how the war allowed these elements to survive and even flourish. In the recently annexed territories, ‘banditry’ (that is, nationalist resistance) continued to hamper the organization of collectives, spreading fear and confusion among the peasantry. Finally, the soviet, party, police and Komsomol organizations had been weakened during the war and had not sufficiently recovered to pursue vigorously the establishment of order, provide inspiration and guidance in reconstituting the kolkhozes.

Khrushchev proposed to Stalin several major initiatives. First, to provide better security for the collectives, he recommended that the penal battalions be transferred from the army to the security organs so that they could be stationed permanently in the villages where there were collectives and in places where it was necessary to set up kolkhozes, while at the same time thoroughly purging the organs and militia of incompetents and shirkers. He expressed his intention, when next in Moscow, of requesting from Stalin armoured cars and radio equipment for the security organs (and even large numbers of guard dogs) to improve their fighting capability. Finally, he proposed the creation of what later became known as ‘courts of honour’ to supplement the judicial procedures for crimes committed under the law codes and generate greater local initiative in overcoming lax and morally reprehensible behaviour by peasants.⁷³

Stalin’s response to these multiple threats to the well-being of the peasantry was, characteristically, to impose ever-tighter controls, and to impose on the agricultural sector what Alec Nove has called ‘an extraordinary administrative mish-mash’.⁷⁴ In light of the unrelieved suffering inflicted on the peasantry by wartime sacrifices and the postwar re-imposition of a morally bankrupt collective farm system, Stalin’s words of praise for the Russian people in his victory speech ring hollow indeed. He had already warned the population in his February 1946 election speech that war was inevitable as long as capitalism survived; this was a transparent hint to prepare for the next war. Sacrifice would continue to be the lot of the people. The paradox remained in place. The postwar reconstruction of the ship of state was like the prewar model – undermined by the means employed.

Stalin’s policy toward the disastrous situation in the countryside was to mount a campaign of coercion aimed at restoring discipline. The law of 2 June 1948, ‘On the expulsion of those who deliberately refuse to work and lead a parasitic way of life’, inspired by Khrushchev’s memo, empowered the commune to expel individuals who were regarded as socially harmful. Over the next five years, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 33,266 members of kolkhozes and 12,598 family members were expelled by the action of village courts with local officials presiding over members of the kolkhozes.⁷⁵ This measure was designed to supplement the activities of the legal authorities prosecuting violations of the Kolkhoz Statute law of 1935. The number of convictions of collective farm chairmen and team leaders had already reached alarming proportions in the first postwar year.⁷⁶

The war also had a devastating effect on the school system which had played a major role in shaping the values of the first Soviet generation. The requisitioning of school buildings for hospitals and other pressing needs accelerated a prewar trend. As a result, the number of children attending school decreased sharply. The Ministry of Education lacked political clout to reclaim many of the buildings after the war, especially those under army control. Budgetary allocations to education were shifted to meet defence priorities, creating severe shortages of materials and teachers. In the occupied territories, the schools system virtually collapsed; 43 per cent of the schools in the country were destroyed. The rural school network suffered the most. Eight years after the war, the majority of schools in the countryside remained in converted peasant huts.⁷⁷ The diminution of a crucial transmission belt for training rural youth added to an already irreparable decline of the collective farm system.

THE RETURN TO PLANNING

Stalin’s economic policy in the postwar era gave priority to the mobilization of resources for the rapid repair of wartime damage to the industrial sector and the immediate return to planning. His hopes for substantial financial assistance from the West were already fading several years before the death knell sounded by the Marshall Plan. Lend-Lease was abruptly terminated by Truman at the end of the war. Stalin’s repeated requests for a long-term and low-interest $6 billion loan from the United States were tied to conditions (on repayment, return of unused goods and requirements to join a more liberalized international economic order) that the Soviet Union found difficult to accept.⁷⁸ The expected delivery of reparations from Germany also fizzled out. The policy of stripping industrial plants of all movable equipment was imposed on the defeated enemy in East Germany, Romania and Manchuria. It was substantial, but often carried out hastily and haphazardly, resulting in unnecessary waste and loss.⁷⁹ The Soviet Union would have to rely primarily on its own resources.

During the war, Stalin had patronized leading representatives of two schools of Marxist economic thinking led by Voznesensky and Varga, whose views of the postwar world differed, leading to an open conflict. Paradoxically, the more theoretically original and deviant Varga survived, although disciplined, while the orthodox Voznesensky did not. The reasons for this, however, were more political than economic. In the first postwar year, Voznesensky was also entrusted with drafting the fourth five-year plan, which achieved notable success. According to the most optimistic estimates, the militarization of the Soviet wartime economy had produced impressive results in individual branches such as labour productivity in military industry and aviation industry compared to Germany, even if the quality lagged behind. The organization and production experience of military industry were of little use in the postwar economy and many of its achievements were lost. Nevertheless, the fourth five-year plan designed by Voznesensky and his deputies benefited from the high level of skill and efficiency of the senior levels of managers and administrators whom he had helped to recruit during the war.⁸⁰ Recovery was rapid in gross outputs. Although there was a reduction in the size of the conventional armed forces, due to the postwar need for manpower to repair the damage, the plan maintained high levels of defence spending and investment in the nuclear programme.⁸¹ Voznesensky’s promotion to a full Politburo membership in 1947 followed the publication of his celebrated book, The Military Economy of the USSR during the Fatherland War. Written shortly after the war, it sat on Stalin’s desk for a year before he returned it with annotations, corrections and his initials of approval. Voznesensky re-affirmed the basic principles of the Soviet economic system, with the law-governed plan regulated by a scientific determination of production costs and the utilization of outputs, but he also admitted that peacetime norms had been violated under the pressures of wartime emergency.⁸² To return to peacetime regularities he stressed the need for a more extensive role for economic levers such as money, prices, credit and incentives and private trade in the form of co-operatives to compete with state stores. To control inflation and restore financial discipline, a currency reform was introduced and rationing was abolished.⁸³

Encouragement in that direction would have to have come from Stalin. In his election speech of February 1946, he reminded the people that the inevitability of war remained as long as capitalism survived; but this placed the threat on a distant horizon. He balanced this by insisting on the importance of immediately improving the material condition of the population and the means of production to achieve it. These views were further developed by a special commission entrusted with the drafting of a new party programme in 1947, in which Zhdanov and Voznesensky played the leading roles.⁸⁴ The committee set as its main task to design for the economic development of the country for the next twenty to thirty years. While maintaining the emphasis on the increase of heavy industry, the planners envisaged a dramatic leap in consumer production, including provisions for making available individual apartments for the working class, free distribution of basic food products (bread and meat) to the population and the production of private automobiles. These utopian aspirations foreshadowed subsequent proposed reforms by Khrushchev and Aleksei Kosygin, an associate of Voznesensky in Leningrad and minister of light industry after the war, who went on to be a major figure in the planning of reforms in the Soviet economy.⁸⁵ These ideas could be distorted to appear to challenge the growing authority of the military-industrial complex that was increasingly dominated by Beria and Malenkov.⁸⁶ But given Voznesensky’s record during the war, his role in drafting the fourth five-year plan and membership of the Secret Committee on the Atomic Project, something more concrete was necessary to undermine his authority in the economic sphere. A conspiracy to destroy him was already under way, and culminated in what came to be known as the Leningrad Affair (see below, pp. 254–61).

REINING IN THE INTELLIGENTSIA

Even before the end of hostilities, Stalin demonstrated his determination to cut back or eliminate the relative autonomy of groups among the intelligentsia which expected to benefit from their contributions to the war effort to improve their standing in Soviet society relative to the party. His suspicious nature, ever receptive to conspiracies, tempered in the revolutionary underground and struggle for power, did not, however, operate in a random fashion. His gaze fell on specific targets that had emerged during the war behind the façade of patriotism. In seeking the sources of new forms of anti-party activity, he turned more frequently to the tried-and-tested tactic of organizing ‘discussions’ on a wide range of topics, mainly cultural and intellectual but also in such varied fields as genetics and the economy. Sometimes the agendas were fixed, but not always. They also served as a way of revealing the dimensions of opinion, which could then be used to support desired outcomes or denounce unacceptable ones.

Almost immediately after peace was declared, Stalin turned his attention once more to the cultural front, which required a thorough overhaul. By devising their own methods of demonstrating patriotism, writers had acquired a greater degree of freedom of expression and scientists had claimed an autonomous sphere for their work. Could this spontaneous flowering of independent thought and action on the fringes of partiinost’ be allowed to continue? A new challenge complicated his task. Despite his best efforts to limit direct contacts with the West, his embrace of the Grand Alliance, his celebration of the second front and the influx of Lend-Lease products – from canned meat to Studebaker trucks – created widespread sympathy for Britain and the US among the population in general and the intelligentsia in particular. How could the financial and political advantages of good relations for postwar reconstruction be maintained without admitting greater influence and perhaps even pressure from the West on the evolution of the Soviet system? Much depended on how serious he regarded that threat to be. It quickly became clear that he intended to re-impose controls on the intelligentsia, but his methods were not always direct and were often masked. Discussion was only one method for exploring differences among his subordinates on questions he had not resolved in his own mind. On other issues he set one member of his inner circle against another. On still others he intervened directly and brutally. His major ideological task was to adjust the balance between two potentially contradictory themes of russo-centrism and Soviet patriotism with its emphasis on the brotherhood of nations. In his efforts to mobilize the population of the entire country, Stalin had contributed himself to the gap opening up between the two visions of the socialist state by allowing and indeed encouraging each tendency to push beyond the limits set by partiinost’.

What is in need of serious revision, however, is the well-entrenched interpretation that the re-imposition of controls over the creative intelligentsia began with A.A. Zhdanov’s attack in August 1946 on the Leningrad writers Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova, inaugurating the campaign known as Zhdanovshchina. From mid-1943, the security services began to report on ‘anti-Soviet manifestations and negative political moods among writers and journalists’. The results were stunning. Based on what must have been information from informers, a number of leading writers were quoted as having expressed views that were far more subversive than anything Zoshchenko or Akhmatova ever wrote. Prominent among these opinions were harsh criticisms of Stalin personally and denunciation of the entire arts bureaucracy for killing independent thought. Hope was expressed for help from the West. Yet no arrests followed.⁸⁷

After Zoshchenko was attacked publicly by critics, he wrote to Stalin in November 1943 defending himself. Instead of recanting as was the normal procedure, he asked Stalin to read his work and judge for himself. Not having received an answer, he wrote to Shcherbakov, this time apologizing for his errors.⁸⁸ But Zhdanov was not satisfied and urged the critics to redouble their criticisms. Zoshchenko was still not cowed. Questioned by police agents, he continued to defend himself. Writing in Bol’shevik, he accused members of the Writers’ Union – and in particular the deputy head of the Central Committee’s Agitprop Department, the academician Aleksandr Egolin – of hypocrisy in reversing their opinion of his work. Then, Zoshchenko threw down the gauntlet: ‘It is easier to guide industry and railroads than it is art’, he declared. ‘Our leaders frequently do not have a deep understanding of the goals of the arts.’⁸⁹ Zoshchenko was not alone in taking this position but only a few others were willing to back him up.

The persistent demands of the Agitprop Department of the Central Committee to exercise ‘oversight’ over editorial boards did not stem the tide of ‘harmful works’.⁹⁰ Vsevolod Merkulov, Beria’s deputy, complained to Zhdanov in October 1944 that the writers who had been criticized by the Central Committee remained defiant.⁹¹ Throughout the next months, Malenkov’s deputies in the Agitprop Department continued to submit similar reports, focusing on the Leningrad writers.⁹² Yet still nothing was done. Stalin became annoyed with the failure to discipline the Leningrad journals. In April 1946, the Politburo instructed Zhdanov and Aleksandrov to submit proposals to improve propaganda and agitation. The following month, Stalin took steps to reduce the authority of Malenkov and Beria, balancing them with Zhdanov, who was given the task of overseeing the Central Committee apparatus and setting the tone for ideological and cultural policy.⁹³

The choice of Zhdanov as Stalin’s chief spokesman on the restored cultural front poses a number of questions that remain puzzling. In some ways, he appeared well suited to the role. He considered himself highly educated and culturally sensitive, having studied the piano. Yet his performance as a political figure was patchy, not to say unimpressive. In 1937, he had co-signed with Stalin the notorious order to speed up the terror. His debut in foreign policy had been disastrous. In 1940, he had advocated a ‘forward’ policy, coming close to the doctrine of an offensive war. He had supported the attack on Finland and misjudged Hitler’s intentions.⁹⁴ As party boss in Leningrad, he was responsible for defending the city. He repulsed the efforts of his rivals Malenkov and Beria in December 1941 to withdraw all forces from the city in order to defend Moscow. But then conflicting reports circulated about his leadership.⁹⁵ At the end of the siege of Leningrad, Stalin appointed him chair of the Allied Control Commission in Finland. Zhdanov dutifully carried out instructions from Molotov and Stalin to adhere strictly to the terms of the armistice. He warned his staff not to get mixed up in Finnish politics, not to bring pressure on the Finnish government or even give advice to the Finnish communists. Of all the Soviet proconsuls in Eastern Europe, he appeared to be the most willing to follow the rules of co-operation with the West.⁹⁶ Stalin appeared satisfied with his performance and brought him back to the Central Committee. Whatever Zhdanov’s weaknesses, Stalin was, according to Molotov, very fond of Zhdanov and willing to forgive his sins.⁹⁷ Having received Zhdanov back into the inner circle, was Stalin continuing to test his loyalty by giving him the unpleasant assignment of attacking the literary culture of his own city?

Zhdanov’s response to the criticism of the Leningrad writers and the thick literary journals by Malenkov’s men in the Agitprop Department is worth discussing in detail. The documents strongly suggest that Zhdanov had decided to cover himself by taking charge of the ideological campaign himself. By this tactic he was able to avoid a wholesale ‘massacre’ of leading writers and intellectuals and absolve himself of the blame for having allowed them to flourish in his bailiwick.⁹⁸ He diligently adopted Stalin’s language and took the offensive by singling out Zoshchenko, Akhmatova and the editors of Zvezda and Leningrad as the chief culprits in the unsatisfactory state of affairs in Leningrad and by implication elsewhere in the literary community.⁹⁹ In the week of 7–13 August, three events led up to this outcome. First, the report of Aleksandrov and Egolin to Zhdanov strongly condemned the Leningrad writers and poets. There was nothing new here that had not formed part of past criticisms, except for one serious accusation directed at the Leningrad party committee for ‘missing ideological errors’. Then, at a meeting of the Orgburo with members of the Agitprop Department, the Leningrad party organization, the Leningrad journals and the Writers’ Union, Stalin set the tone. There was none of the harsh accusatory language one might have expected from him. Instead, he expressed annoyance at Zoshchenko’s ‘Adventures of a Monkey’, calling it a ‘silly story’, a ‘trivial puppet show piece’. More seriously, he criticized the editor of Leningrad for having ‘tiptoed in front of foreign writers’. He urged the editor to speak more ‘firmly’ in admitting his mistakes. What he wanted, he said, was ‘better works published, we want to emphasize quality’. He made no blanket condemnation: ‘Sometimes Zvezda publishes remarkable pieces, absolute diamonds, and alongside diamonds – manure.’ There was no mention of socialist realism in the entire discussion of several hours.¹⁰⁰

Zhdanov’s report, written a few days later on 14 August, and later highly praised by Stalin, employed much harsher language. Yet, for all its invective, there was little that was new. Akhmatova had been denounced as far back as 1940 and with some of the very same language. As we have seen, Zoshchenko was under attack from 1943. Moreover, he continued to defend himself before Stalin even after the meeting of the Orgburo.¹⁰¹ Despite Zhdanov’s famous report, which was then published in Pravda in September, no arrests followed. The major consequence was the reorganization of the Writers’ Union and a shake-up of its leadership. Two Leningrad journals were closed and personnel changes were made in the editorial boards of two others.

While tightening the lines on the literary sector of the cultural front occupied most of the attention of the guardians of ideological conformity, music did not escape their gaze. The postwar revival of the ‘musical uproar’ of the 1930s exhibited some paradoxical features that shed further light on Stalin’s methods of reining in creative autonomy among the Soviet intelligentsia. In the first two years after the end of the war, Stalin continued to reward – lavishly, one is tempted to add – the contributions made by the composers to the war effort. Then he reversed course and permitted or incited attacks against them. Once he concluded that they were sufficiently chastised by a rap or two on the knuckles, he allowed them to return gradually to their eminent position in Soviet music.

In 1946, Shostakovich took personal advantage of a successful performance of one of his songs by the ensemble of the song and dance group of the NKVD, which had been salvaged by Beria after the changes in the state security organs that had removed him from his previous position. In a letter to Beria, Shostakovich requested assistance for a substantial improvement in his living conditions, which Beria passed on to Stalin. Stalin approved the allocation to the composer of a five-bedroom apartment and 60,000 rubles to repair his dacha. Shostakovich had acted without going through the normal channels of the Composers’ Union and the Committee on the Arts, which did not have the resources to satisfy his needs; he wrote to Stalin through the special organs.¹⁰² The soon-to-be-condemned composers were meanwhile strongly represented, highly praised and decorated in the celebration of the eightieth anniversary of the Moscow Conservatory.¹⁰³ In the competition for a new national hymn, the works of Prokofiev and Shostakovich were singled out for praise.¹⁰⁴ Another group of composers – including Aram Khachaturian, Reinhold Glière and Vano Muradeli – appealed to Voroshilov for a revision of the 1934 pay rates for musical works by Soviet composers. Opposed by the Finance Ministry, the proposal led to a quarrel among representatives of different musical organizations over the compensation for vocal works, a hint of the conflict to come over serious and light music. But for the moment the pre-eminence and prestige of the leading Soviet composers and especially the Leningraders was not seriously challenged.¹⁰⁵ But this was soon to change.

In March 1947 one of the first sustained criticisms reached Stalin from the ranks of performing musicians on the failure of such leading lights as Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Shebalin to write music that was comprehensible to the majority of Soviet citizens. The writer, a violinist, attributed the problem to the absence of folk songs and dances in their music. The situation was bad in chamber music, he wrote, but worse in opera where the vocal parts could not even be sung. He requested Stalin to point out the errors of their ways.¹⁰⁶ This and similar complaints from below were still being gathered and preserved in the confidential reports (svodky) to Stalin, when in May 1947 Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace was awarded a Stalin Prize 1st Class for the composition and the performance.¹⁰⁷ As late as November 1947, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Khachaturian were awarded the title of people’s artist of the Russian Soviet Republic, which was confirmed in February 1948 at the very time when the Central Committee was preparing the bombshell to explode beneath Muradeli’s opera.¹⁰⁸

Meanwhile, a sharp reversal on the cultural front was gaining momentum. Once again Zhdanov spearheaded the assault by carefully preparing the ground. In reviewing the work of the committee on Stalin Prizes in mid-summer, he made the startling comment that though he was not a fan of cacophonic music, having been brought up on the ‘mighty handful’ of Russian composers and Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Verdi, ‘perhaps I have lagged behind the newest tendencies in the musical world and am unable now to value cacophonic music?’ He went on to criticize E.K. Golubev’s oratorio Immortal Heroes for being cacophonic, among other sins. A work on the theme of the Great Fatherland War, he concluded, was ‘important and should be well developed’. Despite some good points, then, the work did not deserve the Stalin Prize.¹⁰⁹

By December, Zhdanov had moved to a general offensive. He entrusted the attack to Shepilov, a new figure in his entourage, who can be described as a survivor of the factional in-fighting that characterized the immediate postwar years. In his memoirs, Shepilov described himself as a member of the heroic ‘revolutionary romanticists’, the generation of Komsomoltsy, born of proletarian parents, steeped in the classics of Marxist-Leninist literature, hardened by years of physical labour and tempered by military service as a political commissar in the Second World War, a role that took him from the defence of Moscow to Stalingrad, Bucharest and Vienna. Contemptuous of the ‘petty bourgeois careerists’ in the Agitprop Department of the Central Committee, who were ‘neither revolutionaries nor Marxists’ (as represented by Malenkov’s client, Aleksandrov and his minions), Shepilov responded with enthusiasm to Zhdanov’s invitation to join him in restoring the ideological defences of the cultural front. He was appointed deputy head of the Agitprop Department under another rising star, Mikhail Suslov.¹¹⁰ But it was Stalin who provided the occasion for a wholesale review and condemnation of deviant tendencies in Soviet music when he reacted negatively to the first performance of Muradeli’s new opera The Great Friendship.

In 1941 the young Georgian composer had first mooted writing an opera on the exploits of Sergo Ordzhonikidze in the Russian Civil War; it had then been included in the work plan of the Bolshoi Theatre. Originally entitled The Extraordinary Commissar, it was rebaptized The Great Friendship in 1947. Zhdanov first reacted to Stalin’s remarks by attempting unsuccessfully to persuade the performers to disassociate themselves from the work. He then decided the opera afforded an opportunity to set down some general principles on the production of music.¹¹¹ Shepilov was entrusted with the task of reviewing the achievements and shortcomings of Soviet composers in preparation for the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers, scheduled to meet in February 1948.

Although in his lengthy and repetitive report Shepilov praised symphonic compositions by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Myaskovsky and Khachaturian for having raised Soviet symphonic music to the ‘first rank in the world’, Shepilov then turned 180 degrees to condemn symphonic music for having failed to reach the vast mass of the Soviet people by virtue of its difficulty, formalistic tendencies and lack of realistic portrayal of life, in contrast to ‘opera and other democratic genres’. But the review also portrayed Soviet opera as a complete disaster: ‘for thirty years composers had failed to produce a single opera that occupied a firm place in the permanent repertoire.’ While praising specific works by Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Myaskovsky, particularly their vocal compositions, such as Shostakovich’s cantata Motherland and his oratorio Song of the Forest, and Prokofiev’s cantata Dawn of a Mighty Region, the report went on to criticize much of their ‘abstract instrumental’ work: the very same work which, according to an earlier part of the report, had gained Soviet music its worldwide reputation. Much of the blame was laid at the door of the Committee on the Arts and the Orgburo of the Union of Soviet Composers for commissioning works lacking popular appeal. These organizations were also taken to task for ignoring the needs of composers in the union republics while committing their resources to the Leningrad and Moscow composers. He held up as the ideal the Russian romantic tradition of Glinka, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. The words ‘socialist realism’ did not appear in the text.¹¹² The implication of this paradoxical diatribe was clear. Soviet music was expected to perform two functions by appealing to two audiences: first and foremost to meet the tastes of the popular masses at home, primarily among Russians but also among the nationalities, and second to meet the standards of world-class music.

Muradeli’s opera was mentioned as one of those containing serious political errors, but was not singled out for special critical treatment. For reasons that are not entirely clear, but might be due to Stalin’s personal involvement, the opera became the focus for a major propaganda campaign on the themes of partiinost’. Russo-centrism and nationality policy, which had dominated the cultural front in the 1930s, had been allowed to lose some of their ideological force during the war. Underlying these themes was the issue of the autonomy of the intelligentsia which had come to the fore during the war, as it had for the scientific community.¹¹³

Armed with this report, the Politburo – or, more accurately, Stalin – ordered a thorough purge of the leadership of the Committee on the Arts of the Central Committee, the Orgburo of the Union of Soviet Composers and the Musical Section of the Stalin Prize Committee.¹¹⁴ The Central Committee then inaugurated a campaign against Muradeli’s opera as emblematic of the parlous state of Soviet music, declaring that ‘in his desire to achieve a falsely conceived originality, Muradeli ignored and disregarded the finest traditions and experience of classical opera and particularly of Russian classical opera’. This lack of melodic, artistic and refined music which had made Russian opera ‘the best in the world’ prevented Muradeli’s creation from reaching a wide section of the public. The resolution also criticized Muradeli for having ‘failed to draw on the wealth of folk melodies, songs, tunes and dance motifs so abundant in the folk creations of the peoples of the USSR and in particular among the peoples of the North Caucasus’. The Central Committee seized on the occasion to reflect on the ‘present unsatisfactory state of Soviet music’ in general, characterizing it as dominated by a formalist trend. The harsh wording of the resolution traced the errors of Soviet composers going back to Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth, insisting that the situation was particularly unsatisfactory with respect to opera and symphonic music. The leading composers of the Soviet Union, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian, Vissarion Shebalin and Nikolai Myaskovsky were singled out for having filled their music with ‘atonality, dissonance and discord’ and for preferring ‘neuropathological combinations’ to melody. The resolution ended on an ominous note: ‘This music smacks very much of the spirit of the contemporary modernist bourgeois music of Europe and America, which is a reflection of the decay of bourgeois culture and signifies complete negation of musical art, its impasse.’¹¹⁵ Determined to ram home the lessons of the Central Committee, Zhdanov summoned a general assembly of Soviet composers aimed at forcing them to recant their errors. His critical opening remarks were mild compared to what followed.

The composer Tikhon Khrennikov took up the cudgels of denunciation, assailing many of the major works of twentieth-century musicians, not only Russian and Soviet but also American, French and German. He named specifically wartime compositions by Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian and Myaskovsky. He denounced the Committee on the Arts, all the major musical organizations and the journal Sovetskaia muzyka for tolerating and rewarding formalist trends in Soviet music. Khrennikov appeared to understand that this was an occasion to re-affirm the correctness of Stalin’s nationality policy, with its delicate balance between russo-centrism and national traditions which only the vozhd could calibrate.¹¹⁶ In 1948 he was rewarded by Stalin, who personally appointed him the new head of the Composers’ Union, where he remained ensconced until its abolition in 1991 at the end of the Soviet Union.

The paradoxical position of Khrennikov in this unpredictable world of music was as a guardian of Stalinist orthodoxy and a protector of what Shostakovich called intrinsic musical values. As the strict taskmaster of the Union of Soviet Composers, Khrennikov took responsibility for issuing reprimands, handing out demotions and other forms of punishment, even participating in the campaign against cosmopolitanism with its strong anti-Semitic and russifying (but not russo-centric) themes. He counter-attacked when criticized by writing directly to Stalin and he also shielded the leading composers whom he had previously denounced from the worst of the effects of the campaign, and after Stalin’s death returned most of them to positions of honour with appropriate awards and financial entitlements.¹¹⁷

The major targets of Zhdanov’s attack performed the required ritual of self-criticism, but in a selective manner that blunted the ideological edge of the denunciations. While they admitted to allowing aspects of (undefined) formalism to slip into their work, they attributed this to ‘snobbishness’ (Muradeli), ‘certain negative characteristics peculiar to my musical thought’ (Shostakovich), ‘an overemphasis on technique’ (Khachaturian) and ‘self-complacency’ (Prokofiev). All of them claimed to have employed folk songs and melodic elements in their work, if not sufficiently.¹¹⁸ The group sent a sycophantic letter to Stalin in praise of his inspiring leadership in setting the proper course for the direction of Soviet music. But there was more to this incident than stoking Stalin’s amour-propre. Nothing in the Central Committee resolution or the recantations had anything to do with socialist realism. It was part and parcel of the postwar policy of attempting to revoke the elements of autonomy gained by the intelligentsia during the fighting. It was in many ways a return to the thirties, but at a higher level, one soon to be defined as moving from building ‘socialism in one country’ to building communism. The effort was only partially successful. The position won by the creative intelligentsia during the war could not be easily liquidated without inflicting serious damage to the new-found prestige of the Soviet Union as a world power. Moreover, in asserting its cultural hegemony in the popular democracies and claiming to have achieved a level of civilization superior to that of the West, the export of cultural products performed important political tasks.

As the possibilities for the Soviet Union to spread its influence increased as a result of its great victory over fascism, the party faced difficult decisions which forced compromises in its basic principles and produced controversies among the guardians of orthodoxy over which performers and which performances should be sent abroad. The success of the Moiseev ballet company provides one of the most striking examples of resolving a contradiction between ideological orthodoxy and practical results. The company had been vetted as a loyal ensemble and outstanding representative of the Soviet policy of peace and friendship, before touring Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia and Hungary, ‘territory where Soviet troops were stationed’. Visits to Finland and Poland followed. Despite a confidential review by the Ministry of State Security (MGB) that turned up some unsettling details linking Igor Moiseev and his wife to dubious Western contacts, the troupe continued to enjoy Stalin’s protection.¹¹⁹

During the last years of Stalin’s life, Soviet musicians visited the West, but each one had to be personally vetted by him, and not all passed the test. However, with his approval the Moiseev ballet company flourished, becoming the most widely travelled and celebrated international representative of Soviet culture, continuing after his death to gather accolades. Ironically, the foreign critics couched their praise in a language that matched Stalin’s expressed desire to have Soviet music combine folk traditions with the refined technique of the classical dance form. Stalin’s personal intervention at every level of musical life was not so much a victory for centralized control as an overture to a greater entanglement of the administrative lines of authority in the creative life of the Soviet intelligentsia and ideological confusion over the meaning of such catchwords as partiinost’ and narodnost’ while socialist realism faded as a guiding theme. As several accounts make clear, he took decisions on appointments, prizes and celebrations of anniversaries of institutions on the basis of his personal taste, to which he might or might not attach an ideological significance.¹²⁰ In an unexpected result of this ‘brouhaha’, as Kiril Tomoff calls it, the musicians rebuffed the clumsy intervention of the Central Committee and regained some control over their profession. At the same time, there were changes in the leadership of the main musical organizations including the Union of Soviet Composers and demotions of leading composers from positions of influence in the union, the Moscow Conservatory and other musical organizations.

A related challenge facing the new leadership was how to stimulate the development of musical forms in the national republics that would emulate the achievements in the Russian romantic tradition with the addition of indigenous folk songs or dances. One response was to address the complaint that the central leadership was inattentive to the needs of composers outside Moscow. The new leadership created a committee to facilitate links between Moscow and the musical unions of the national republics with the awkward name ‘Committee for the Direction and of the Creativity of the Composers of the USSR’. This did not, however, solve the basic problem of creating a national operatic tradition in places like Uzbekistan.¹²¹

To illustrate by analogy what the party might have expected from the intelligentsia in rebuilding the war-damaged foundations of socialism, one may turn to the exceptionally successful reconstruction of the main thoroughfare of Kiev, the Khreshchatik. The great buildings lining the street were mined by Soviet forces and then blown up while the Germans were in occupation of the city. As soon as Kiev was liberated in 1944 a competition for reconstruction was announced. Twenty-two proposals showed a renewed enthusiasm for the Cossack Baroque style as well as Ukrainian folk motifs. The winning plan, submitted by the famous Russian architects Aleksei Shchusev and Aleksandr Vlasov, combined a modern rendition of folk ornament with a monumental urban ensemble characteristic of the Soviet Russian architecture preferred by Stalin.¹²² Such a combination was much more attainable in architecture which lacked the anthropomorphic element. In painting, literature and operatic music the problem of arriving at an acceptable ideological fit between aesthetic technique, creative spirit and partiinost’ was much more difficult to attain once the overriding theme of defence of the motherland had lost its force.

Stalin’s determination to restore controls over the creative work of the scientific and creative intelligentsia was not accompanied by arrests and executions. These areas had assumed too much importance in promoting the image and reality of an enhanced Soviet position in the world, and the few concessions that he allowed to enhance their self-defined functions and value as semi-autonomous bodies did not in any way endanger his power. The situation was quite different in his postwar assault on the Jews and the group of party leaders in Leningrad. Their contributions to victory were very quickly reduced to ashes because he perceived them in a different light.

POLITICAL PURGES: THE JEWISH ANTI-FASCIST COMMITTEE

The Jews suffered most severely from Stalin’s determination to correct what he regarded as the excess zeal of the nationalities during the war in assuming an autonomous role within the Soviet system. His decision to downplay the patriotic role and unique ordeal of Soviet Jews undercut the widespread sympathy that his wartime policy toward them had gained, not only among the Jewish diaspora but the Western allies as well. Related to these shortcomings was the failure of the Soviet leadership in Stalin’s fierce grip to recognize the persuasive power of an orchestrated appeal to the humanistic and moral supremacy of Soviet civilization over Nazism that had been a mainstay of propaganda during the popular front and which was revived and continued in wartime by such popular figures among the Soviet front-line troops as the Jewish war correspondents Ilia Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman and the Jewish war photographers Emmanuil Evzerkhin, Roman Karmen and Evgeny Khaldei.¹²³

From the beginning, however, doubts were raised in the higher ranks of the party and security services about international contacts with Jewish organizations, especially those stressing the victimization of the Jewish population of the Soviet Union by the Nazis. They were also suspicious of any form of nationalist tendencies (Zionism) which were identified after the war with the establishment of the state of Israel. The party sought to discourage the idea that the Jewish population was somehow different and had endured greater suffering than the rest of the Soviet population. One notorious example was the fate of The Black Book of Soviet Jewry: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders throughout the Temporarily Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the Death Camps of Poland during the War 1941–1945. A collection of eye-witness accounts and documents, it had been compiled in 1943 and 1944 by Ehrenburg, Grossman and other writers, Jewish and non-Jewish, under the auspices of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Soviet censors ordered changes in the text to conceal the exclusively anti-Jewish character of the killings and to downplay the role of Ukrainian police, who had worked with the Nazis. But these changes were not sufficient to alter the picture of the Jews as exceptional victims of Nazism. In 1948, the Soviet edition of the book was scrapped completely. By this time, the JAFC was falling into disfavour over a range of issues. The government twice turned down the request made by Mikhoels and his deputy, Itsik Fefer, that funds raised abroad by Jewish organizations be mailed directly to the JAFC. Molotov justified the decision by claiming that the proposal would enable ‘financial organizations to exploit the opportunity to spread bourgeois ideology in our country’. Moreover, the proposal would ‘separate the Jews from the mass of the Soviet population and create the grounds for anti-Semitism’.¹²⁴ Another sign of the coming reaction was the fate of a proposal made by the JAFC, with Solomon Lozovsky’s support, for the creation of a Soviet Jewish Republic in the Crimea; the peninsula had been depopulated by Stalin’s order to deport the Crimean Tatars for having exhibited disloyalty during the war. After a discussion by Stalin and a few associates, the plan was turned down. Lozovsky also supported the idea of a postwar transformation of the JAFC into a permanent organization with its own newspaper. This too came to naught. Right after the war, the JAFC began to take precautions to defend itself against accusations of nationalism. The journal Eynigkayt began to publish articles denouncing Jewish nationalism. Any mention of Jewish suffering or heroism disappeared from its pages.¹²⁵

These efforts did not prevent Mikhail Suslov, who had taken over the Agitprop Department of the Central Committee, from taking the lead in preparing denunciations of the Zionist and Bundist character of the JAFC’s publications. This was followed by strong recommendations to redefine its work in order to promote the achievements of the Soviet Union abroad and discontinue Eynigkayt as a newspaper.¹²⁶ But the JAFC leadership continued to press for a leading role in representing Jewish interests in the Soviet Union and abroad. Then, in February 1948, the classic pattern of a purely propaganda campaign against ‘bourgeois nationalism’ was violently broken by Stalin’s personal order to have Mikhoels murdered. The circumstances of his killing were bizarre. The killers were two high-ranking members of the MGB operating under the direction of Abakumov; one of the pair, Sergei Ogol’tsov, had in 1942 given the order to execute Wiktor Alter in prison. The assassination had all the hallmarks of a gangland killing: the body of Mikhoels and his companion were given the appearance of having been accidentally run over by a truck. Stalin commended and decorated the killers secretly. The cover-up was elaborate; Pravda printed a laudatory obituary and Mikhoels was given a state funeral.¹²⁷ A month later Abakumov, whom Stalin increasingly employed to dilute Beria’s control over the security services, submitted to the top Soviet leadership the most extensive denunciation of the JAFC as a pro-American, nationalist and anti-Soviet organization with extensive ties to international Jewry and infiltrated by foreign intelligence services.¹²⁸

Reverting to practice, Stalin proceeded more systematically to prepare the ground for the abolition of the JAFC while at the same time moving ahead with plans to support the creation of the state of Israel. Before leaving for his annual vacation, he instructed Malenkov to commission Ehrenburg to write an article on Israel.¹²⁹ Ehrenburg had been in touch with members of the JAFC in his efforts to publish the Black Book. But he knew what was expected of him. His letter, published in Pravda on 21 September 1948, attempted to draw a parallel between anti-Semitism and Zionism. He denounced both as two sides of the same coin, inspired by a racist concept of what it meant to be a Jew; the one – fascist – leading to murderous atrocities; the other – Zionist – also obscurantist, portraying the Jews as a chosen people linked in some mysterious way and seeking to solve the Jewish question by a return to the promised land of Israel. While Ehrenburg affirmed his support for the state of Israel in its struggle to free itself from colonialism and repulse its Arab aggressors, he insisted that the solution to anti-Semitism lay in the victory of the progressive forces of mankind in every country including Israel, as demonstrated by the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies of Eastern Europe.¹³⁰ Within a month, the Politburo ordered the closure of the JAFC as a centre of anti-Soviet propaganda ‘regularly providing anti-Soviet information to organs of foreign intelligence’. The order ended with the words: ‘No one should be arrested yet.’¹³¹

‘Yet’ proved to be a short-lived interim. Within a few months most of the members of the JAFC including Lozovsky were arrested and preparations were under way for their trial. Although tortured in prison, Lozovsky refused to admit his guilt and skilfully demolished the prosecution’s case at his trial. Nevertheless, he was found guilty and, after his appeal to Stalin for clemency was rejected, he was shot in 1952, together with thirteen other members of the JAFC. Grossman survived but died in poverty; Ehrenburg outlived Stalin and with his novel The Thaw, published in 1954, he gave a name to Khrushchev’s postwar policy of liberalization.

The arrests of members of the JAFC had broad implications for internal Soviet politics. The fate of Jews with ties or strong sympathies with the state of Israel now became deeply entangled in a struggle over control of the security services, which Stalin manipulated as part of his Byzantine manoeuvres in his last years to maintain his monopoly of power and forestall any co-ordinated effort to settle the problem of his succession.¹³²

Throughout these months of mounting internal crisis, Stalin approved a strong, apparently paradoxical campaign to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, in contrast to the British and Americans, who initially favoured various forms of trusteeship.¹³³ The Soviet Union was the first country to recognize the state of Israel and to send an ambassador to Tel Aviv. When Golda Meir arrived in Moscow in September 1948 as the Israeli ambassador, she received a warm welcome from Molotov, Vyshinsky and other high-ranking officials of the Foreign Ministry. Upon her arrival she was greeted spontaneously by a delirious crowd of Jews, estimated at 20,000, at the Central Synagogue in Moscow. A similar popular outpouring accompanied her delegation to the Central Synagogue on Rosh Hashanah.¹³⁴ The only cloud on the horizon of official contacts with Israel was the Soviet reluctance to entertain Israeli requests to assist in the emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union.¹³⁵ The war had revived the unresolved paradox of the Jewish question in Soviet society. Jews had played a role second only to the Russians in building the Soviet state, and they had been the only nationality in the war zone that had not furnished the enemy with collaborators or defectors.¹³⁶ But they were also the nationality with the best-organized and most affluent diaspora in the West and the only nationality to have created an independent state outside the Soviet Union. They were also the only nationality with a separate organizing committee that had ties outside the Soviet Union. The creation of the state of Israel offered the Soviet Union a unique opportunity to penetrate the Middle East. But the shadow of Zionism – or rather its ghost from the early days of the socialism movement in Russia – haunted Stalin with renewed fears about dual loyalties. And despite their contribution to the war effort, Jewish patriots were turned into traitors.

POLITICAL PURGES: THE LENINGRAD AFFAIR

A very different group of celebrated wartime figures converted into victims of cooked-up conspiracies in the early postwar years were leading members of the Leningrad party organization, who were protégés of Andrei Zhdanov. For all its cross-currents and murky details, the so-called Leningrad Affair can be described as a phase in the struggle for succession. It also fits into the paradoxical pattern of Stalin’s postwar policies at its extreme expression: the destruction of a group which had contributed to one of the most celebrated victories of the war, the defence of Leningrad during its 900-day siege. A revival of the blood-letting that had stained the party in the thirties after a victorious war under the banner of unity can only be explained as a consequence of the high stakes involved. By the end of the war, it was clear to his inner circle that Stalin was in physical decline and the question of who would succeed him loomed large. Zhdanov’s star was again in the ascendance after a brief period of disfavour. He was welcomed back to Moscow’s inner circle in 1944 and even acquired a reputation abroad as a potential successor to Stalin.¹³⁷ This possibility acquired increasing weight as Stalin reshuffled the older generation of leaders – including Molotov, Beria and Malenkov – in order to reduce their authority in the Central Committee and the security services.¹³⁸

The signs of a factional struggle between Zhdanov and Malenkov together with Beria dated back to the late thirties.¹³⁹ Although the incidence and prominence of their clashes diminished during the war, they came to the surface again soon after the end of hostilities. There were clear signs that the factional struggle was growing in intensity as the stakes increased.¹⁴⁰

After the war, Stalin made several changes in the top leadership of the party. Zhdanov’s return to the centre as secretary of the Central Committee and member of the Politburo signalled the rise to prominence within the leading cadres of the party and government of his protégés, most of them from the Leningrad organization. Most prominent among them was Voznesensky, who emerged from the war with a heightened reputation. Rewarded for his distinguished wartime service, he was promoted to full member of the Politiburo in 1947. At the same time, his book, The Military Economy of the USSR during the Fatherland War, was published to great acclaim and received the Stalin Prize in 1948.

As the head of Gosplan, he was in charge of drafting the fourth five-year plan, which, as we have seen (above, p. 237), achieved impressive results in restoring the command economy and providing for a higher standard of living. Moreover, in August 1945 he was appointed to the high-powered Special Committee on the Atomic Bomb of GOKO (subsequently of the Sovnarkom) together with Beria, Malenkov, the industrial managers Vannikov, Avraamii Zaveniagin and Mikhail Pervukhin, one of Beria’s men, general Vasily Makhnev, and the scientists Kapitsa and Kurchatov. Voznesensky and Zaveniagin were assigned the tasks of supervising the construction and management of factories and laboratories, responding to bottlenecks in production and providing material and financial resources for the many enterprises involved in the project. The full committee reviewed the proposals of Vannikov and Kurchatov and drafted documents for Stalin’s signature. Meetings of the committee invariably involved a large number of engineers, scientists and industrial managers who received instructions on a myriad of tasks devolving from their decisions. Voznesensky participated in all seventy-three meetings of the committee up to his removal.¹⁴¹

Another Leningrader who had risen to prominence as a result of his wartime service was Aleksei Kuznetsov. Originally recruited by Sergei Kirov, he had performed heroic service during the war as deputy secretary of the Leningrad city organization in organizing the city’s defences. In 1946 Kuznetsov had earned Malenkov’s enmity by exposing the serious errors he had permitted in the administration of the Ministry of Aviation.¹⁴² He was promoted as Central Committee secretary and head of the key cadres department, replacing Malenkov. He was also placed in charge of overseeing the newly created Ministry of State Security run by Abakumov, a former associate of Beria. Subsequently, a resentful Abakumov became a central figure in purging the Leningraders.

Stalin reportedly expressed in a private conversation his preference for Voznesensky and Kuznetsov as his successors, in state policy and party policy respectively, greatly enhancing their authority.¹⁴³ Doubtless this comment or rumour could only have alarmed Malenkov and Beria. There is also evidence that Stalin instructed Kuznetsov as head of cadres to promote younger men with outstanding wartime records to positions of greater responsibility.¹⁴⁴ Here is where the contradictory or obscure elements of the affair begin to surface. Kuznetsov proceeded to increase the appointment of Leningraders throughout the Soviet Union following Zhdanov’s example of appointing his men to head the Novgorod and Pskov oblasts. But Zhdanov now came out against the over-centralization of appointments made by the Central Committee, that is against Kuznetsov.¹⁴⁵ Moreover, Stalin had made it clear as early as 1937 that appointments should not be made on the basis of personal relations; this was anti-Bolshevik and ‘should end before it is too late’.¹⁴⁶ Kuznetsov ignored these warning signs and continued to appoint or promote his men in regional party organizations throughout the Russian Republic and to key positions in the Central Committee.

A third key figure in the Leningrad Affair was Mikhail Rodionov, brought in by Zhdanov from Gorky before the war. He had also participated in the defence of Leningrad and was appointed chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Republic and member of the Orgburo of the party. Other important appointments of Zhdanov clients included Voznesensky’s brother, the rector of Leningrad University during the siege, who was raised to the post of minister of education of the Russian Republic during the wartime educational reform. Aleksei Kosygin, born and educated in Leningrad, had worked closely with Rodionov during the war to sustain the city during the siege. He had organized the colossal tasks of transporting over 1,500 factories to the Urals and supervising the construction of the famous ice road across Lake Ladoga during the siege, which enabled the evacuation of half a million Leningraders and kept the city supplied with food and fuel. In 1943 he was appointed chief of the Sovnarkom of the Russian Republic, and after the war minister of finance (1946) and then light industry (1948–53). In this post he was associated with the rise in living standards, a reputation he was to parley into a leading role in the post-Stalin government for the following thirty years. According to his grandson, Malenkov and Beria wrote to Stalin urging him to eliminate Kosygin as part of the Leningrad conspiracy. During this period he feared for his life. But Stalin valued his administrative skill and his independence from factional politics; he also had the support of Anastas Mikoian.¹⁴⁷

Shepilov was not a Leningrader by birth or service, but he was very much a Zhdanov protégé. His distinguished wartime record as a political commissar with the southwestern front from Stalingrad to Vienna had earned him an influential position as head of the Agitprop Department of the Central Committee, where, under Zhdanov’s supervision, as we have seen (above p. 244), he had drafted the attack on the Soviet composers. But he also fell under the shadow of Malenkov, who told him ‘We have been after you for a long time’. Shortly after Voznesensky’s arrest he was denounced by a Politburo resolution for having failed to exercise control over the journal Bol’shevik and for having recommended Voznesensky’s book to regional secretaries as a text. He was dismissed from his position. But Stalin spared him. Considering him ‘an educated Marxist’, Stalin not only had him appointed an inspector of the Central Committee, but also discussed with him the editing of a new textbook on economics.¹⁴⁸ Although these men were the most influential of Zhdanov’s protégés, the Leningrad party organization, Gosplan and numerous second-level figures in industry, cultural affairs and education were indebted to him for his patronage. Once Zhdanov had died in August 1948 of a heart attack, possibly as the result of a misdiagnosis, his erstwhile rivals rapidly set about to destroy his patronage network.

The conspirators were headed by Malenkov, with Beria standing in the background, and Matvei Shkiriatov, the dreaded deputy of the Party Control Commission, and Abakumov, the wartime head of SMERSH and from 1946 minister of state security, as point men.¹⁴⁹ They moved along two converging lines. The first directed against Kuznetsov, for his activities as virtual boss of Leningrad and as head of the cadres department of the Central Committee engaged in colonizing other local party organizations in the Russian Republic; and the second against Voznesensky, for errors in the economic sector and then as the alleged real patron of the Leningraders. The conspiracy was put together gradually from October 1948 to August 1949, although, as we have seen, its origins went back to the war and even earlier. Straws in the winds of war were reassembled by the conspirators to provide evidence of widespread corruption – or ‘politically improper conduct by second-level party members in Leningrad’ – covered up by their superiors.¹⁵⁰ After the war, the accusations focused on the self-promotion of the top Leningrad party members, including Kuznetsov. They had organized commemorations of the defence of the city and renamed public spaces for the purpose of enhancing and inflating their role in what was later denounced as behaviour completely at odds with Bolshevik morality, that is partiinost’.¹⁵¹

Meanwhile, Malenkov launched his campaign on a minor key. In late 1948, he accused the Leningrad party organization of failing to obtain approval from the Council of Ministers for a trade fair in Leningrad, although the organizers had followed the normal procedures. Further discredit was heaped on the Leningrad party for not reporting accurately the results of elections to the local party positions. Malenkov stepped up the level of accusations in February 1949, when he identified Kuznetsov, Rodionov and, as yet, an unknown but small number of their Leningrad associates of being an anti-party group, although no evidence was supplied.

Beria, who was fully cognizant of the obsessions of the vozhd, kept feeding Stalin information that the Leningrad party leaders were strongly considering and even moving toward the creation of their own Central Committee and government of the Russian Federation to counterbalance the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (b) and the Soviet government.¹⁵² Stalin had opposed the formation of a Russian Communist Party since the early 1920s. That this idea was again being discussed infuriated him. At a Politburo meeting on 15 February 1949, he lashed out at a member of the Leningrad group who suggested that ‘the Russian people need their own advocates’. He furiously denounced the sentiment; it ‘smacked of Russian ethnic self-interest and incipient nationalism’.¹⁵³ Voznesensky and Kuznetsov among others were denounced for aiming to convert the Leningrad organization into a regional fiefdom; an ominous resolution compared their activity to that of Zinoviev in the 1920s, when he had ‘attempted to turn the Leningrad organization into a power base for his anti-Leninist faction’.¹⁵⁴ In Stalin’s eyes, Leningrad had continued to represent a centre of opposition even after the defeat of Zinoviev and the purge of his network. In order to rebuild the party organization, Stalin had appointed as party secretary Sergei Kirov, a client and friend of his from the days of the civil war in Transcaucasia, far removed from the lure of local Leningrad politics. When Kirov was assassinated in 1934, Stalin ordered NKVD chief Iagoda to ‘Look for the murderers among the Zinovievites.’¹⁵⁵ Two years later, Zinoviev was tried and executed on the basis of fabricated evidence linking him to the Kirov murder. Zhdanov was brought in from Nizhny Novgorod to re-establish order. Under his aegis, the war had restored an aura of uniqueness to Leningrad. The heroic 900-day resistance of the city, organized mainly by members of the local organization, earned the city of Lenin a place in the pantheon of ‘hero cities’ comparable only to the city of Stalin on the Volga. Could the symbolism have gone unnoticed by the vozhd?

At the same time that the Leningraders were being accused of ambitious political aims, their position on the cultural front was again brought under fire. The party organization was reproached for not having learned their lesson from the criticism of the literary journals in 1946. A resolution published in January 1949 denounced the journal Znamia for ‘several grave errors’, touching off a renewal of the campaign ‘to fight cosmopolitan critics’.¹⁵⁶ It is instructive to recall at this point that in 1946 when Stalin cross-examined the Leningraders in an Orgburo meeting, he had declared that the city was following a different line on culture, influenced by the city intelligentsia; this showed a willingness to bow and scrape before foreigners. ‘Cosmopolitanism’ was another formulaic way of describing the same phenomena.

In the summer, Abakumov was enlisted to write to Stalin, accusing the former secretaries of the Leningrad city and party organizations of being English spies. Under torture they then implicated all the top officials in the Leningrad organization, including Kuznetsov and Rodionov. In August, the accused were arrested and denounced as ‘demagogic’ defenders of the interests of Leningrad, having conducted ‘dubious secret self-seeking combinations’.¹⁵⁷ Meanwhile, the conspirators were preparing to pull Voznesensky into the net.

Already in March Voznesensky had been accused of having juggled the figures for gross industrial output in the first quarter of the plan for 1949 to accommodate Stalin’s unrealistic demand for increased level of production, thereby creating a discrepancy between the level of investment and the published figures. On the basis of Stalin’s hallowed statement that any attempt to alter the figures for Gosplan was a criminal offence, Voznesensky was removed as the body’s president. Although Voznesensky made a correction, Beria followed up on his previous accusations that he had made similar errors in drafting the fourth five-year plan. Having acquired the compromising document from one of Voznesensky’s deputies, Beria returned to the attack with the serious allegation, which was incorporated into a Politburo resolution, that ‘Gosplan has followed a biased and dishonest approach to planning and above all to evaluating the fulfilment of plans’.¹⁵⁸ In July, a recently appointed head of cadres of Gosplan reported that from 1944 to 1949 a number of documents had disappeared from the Gosplan offices. Malenkov forwarded the note to Stalin. It was now the turn of Shkiriatov, acting for the Party Control Commission, to draw up a bill of indictment against Voznesensky, which for the first time linked him to the ‘anti-party’ Leningrad group. He recommended that Voznesensky be excluded from the Central Committee and put on trial for the loss of the documents. This opinion was confirmed by a plenum of the Central Committee, but there was a month’s delay when Stalin apparently was unwilling, as in the cases of Zhukov and Kapitsa, to sacrifice Voznesensky to Beria; instead, he may have considered making him head of the State Bank. In the interim, Shkiriatov prepared another memo outlining in great detail all the peccadilloes of Leningrad party members dating back to 1938 and increasing during and after the war. A heavy emphasis was placed on corruption, embezzlement of party funds, drunkenness, favouritism and licentious behaviour. Voznesensky was not named in connection with these anti-party activities, but rather as the alleged ‘patron of the group’.¹⁵⁹ For unclear reasons, it took a month after Voznesensky was denounced and excluded from the Central Committee before the plenum ordered his arrest along with a number of leading Leningrad party officials including Kuznetzov and Rodionov. With Abakumov in charge, they were interrogated and tortured, revealing other names in an alleged conspiracy. The preparations for a trial extended over a year as Abakumov compiled a list of those to be punished. Although the outcome appeared to be predetermined, a public trial was never held. In September 1950 the Military College of the Supreme Court met in secret and condemned the accused. A few days later Voznesensky, Kuznetsov, Rodionov Kapustin, Popkov and Lazutin were executed with Stalin’s approval.¹⁶⁰

With the loss of their patron, the Leningrad organization was vulnerable to a devastating purge. Malenkov led the charge, with Beria once again providing the foot soldiers. In Leningrad in the period from 1949 to 1952 all five regional party secretaries, the four most senior city soviet officials and several high-level regional officials were purged, and as many as 2,000 from the party, Komsomol and trade unions were dismissed for ‘hostile actions of an anti-party group’, including some outside Leningrad in Zhdanov’s former bailiwick of Gorky.¹⁶¹ Many had performed heroically during the siege, a factor that played no part in determining their fate. Among those tried and shot were Voznesensky’s brother, the former head of Leningrad University and minister of education of the Russian Republic and his sister. Almost all Voznesensky’s deputies in Gosplan were dismissed. The wave of arrests reached a climax in 1952 with the trial and sentencing to long prison terms of fifty persons occupying responsible positions in the Leningrad region during the siege in Leningrad.¹⁶²

A number of puzzling and unresolved elements in the affair remain, perhaps never to be explained fully. Later, when he was in turn accused of being a member of an anti-party group, Malenkov confessed that he had destroyed many documents relating to the case.¹⁶³ Full access to relevant documents in the archives has never been granted. Popular histories abound, most of them offering explanations that are based on one or another of the accusations of the conspirators.¹⁶⁴

The unique murderous character of the Leningrad Affair in the postwar purges can be further illustrated by contrasting it with the Affair of Georgy Popov, the first secretary of the Moscow party committee. In 1949 Stalin received an anonymous letter accusing the Moscow party leadership of organizing a conspiracy to seize power. The results of the investigation he ordered were presented by Malenkov to the Moscow organization. But there was no mention of a conspiracy. Popov and the top leadership of the Moscow party were found culpable of various sins, including attempts to bring pressure on ministers of state to accede to their demands and interests, breaking party discipline and even ignoring Stalin’s personal warning. Popov and his group were relieved of their positions. But there were no arrests and there is no evidence they were dismissed from the party.¹⁶⁵ Yet this is the very time the Leningraders were being crushed.

Stalin’s postwar treatment of the party, the military and the technical and creative intelligentsia was scored with deep lines of suspicion, reflecting long-embedded personal characteristics but appearing to grow ever more irrational. Yet it would be a mistake to ignore or neglect shades of difference in his imposition of punishments on those he perceived as miscreants. They ranged from harsh criticism, demotion and expulsion from official positions to arrest, prison terms and shooting. The following hypothesis is advanced to move beyond the simple verdict of paranoia and to shed light on the murky crevices of his mindset. The evidence is largely circumstantial but highly suggestive, if not compelling.

The one denominator common to almost all the cases was the extent to which the offending individual or group was engaged in political activity that, as Stalin perceived it, challenged his monopoly of ideology and power, including relations with a foreign state. Deviations from what he considered at any moment to be the correct interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, though serious, required a lesser punishment than ‘anti-state’ behaviour, and carried less heavy penalties. In the postwar period, the miscreants never committed political crimes as a primary cause for imprisonment or execution. But even these distinctions are not without exceptions, to be duly noted.

In the cases of Zhukov and his generals, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the Leningrad group, their alleged political challenge to Stalin’s monopoly of power disrupted a pattern of promoting stability in the party and state agencies. Stalin’s methods of controlling the ambitions of his inner circle normally took the form of diluting or reducing their authority. But he did not break up their patronage-client networks; still less did he have their patrons shot. Moreover, he also resisted the attempts of members of the inner circle to destroy their opponents, restraining Beria’s plotting against Zhukov or Kapitsa, resisting Zhdanov’s efforts to eliminate Varga. By contrast, only the assault on the JAFC matched the brutal and extensive purge of the Leningraders. And how to explain Stalin’s decision to spare some prominent figures, like Kosygin and Shepilov, who were closely associated with Voznesensky? Given his penchant for secrecy and the absence of reliable sources on his state of mind, his motivations remain obscure. One can only guess at the various combinations that might have influenced him: their proven value during the war, their administrative skills, but mainly their perceived lack of political ambition. Or was it simply a matter of demonstrating his power to decide men’s fate, or just personal amity or enmity?

SOCIALIST ENCIRCLEMENT

In international politics, Stalin’s policies veered from a welcome alliance with the West against fascism which ended the virtual isolation of the Soviet Union, to a break with the West after their shared ordeal in the Second World War. The result was a return to the idea of capitalist encirclement, tempered by the creation of a socialist bloc that expanded the frontier defences of the Soviet citadel. The victorious Soviet advance into Central Europe and support for the establishment of various forms of popular democracy in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, East Germany, Albania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia laid the foundations for a socialist bloc or commonwealth, although this term was not used at the time. In the early postwar years, Stalin gave serious consideration to the idea of separate roads to socialism.¹⁶⁶ But Stalin was concerned about the internal stability of these governments. Except for Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, the local communist parties were in a distinct minority; their leaders inexperienced in governing; the opposition strongly anti-Soviet. He was quick to criticize their mistakes in the areas of politics and economics.

The year 1948 witnessed the confluence of three trends in international politics that had a pronounced and disturbing – not to say disastrous – impact on Stalin’s decision to intervene more brusquely, even violently, in the affairs of the local communist parties along parallel lines with his domestic policies. The first was the growing involvement of the United States in Europe, culminating in the Marshall Plan, but already foreshadowed by the Truman Doctrine and the formation of the Organization for Economic Co-operation. At the same time, the US government embarked on an unprecedented commitment to overseas intelligence activities which, though clandestine, did not go unnoticed by the Soviet security services. The second was the rupture with Tito, which Stalin interpreted as a nationalist deviation, a dangerous detour on the path to socialism. The third was the creation of the state of Israel, which initially he supported to enhance Soviet and diminish Western influence in the Middle East. Soon disillusioned on that score, he distrusted the sympathy Israel engendered in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He suspected it of reviving the spectre of Zionism with its threat of dual loyalty, which he thought had long before been put to rest. Stalin interpreted these developments as intertwined in a hostile combination that threatened Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and the recovery and security of the Soviet Union.

The accusations were employed like a spiked club to discipline the East European communist parties, which had been allowed to stray during the war along their national paths to socialism. In identifying the miscreants, Soviet diplomats, country specialists and above all the security services were actively involved at all stages, from denunciations to interrogations and torture. They were able to exploit factional and personal rivalries among the local parties that had developed during the war. Involved in their own struggles for power, local communist leaders provided fabricated information and invited Soviet security personnel to assist them in destroying their colleagues and even the leaders of other national parties. Most of the victims were loyal Stalinists who had undergone severe tests of their dedication during the war.¹⁶⁷ Thus, the effect of the purges was to eliminate many of the ‘best people’, whose contribution to building socialism was thereby lost. Like many of the condemnations at home, so too in the foreign communist parties, rehabilitations followed Stalin’s death. But not in all cases; the miasma of falsifications hung heavily over the parties down to the collapse of communist rule.