Russia. A History полностью

The post-war era was the apogee of Stalin’s cult of personality. Stalin was accorded god-like veneration: he was the hero of plays and the subject of folksongs; symphonies and odes were composed in his honour; canals and dams were dedicated to his name. Statues of gypsum, concrete, granite, and marble were erected in his image. Orators praised him as ‘the father of the peoples’, ‘the coryphaeus of all sciences’, the ‘highest genius of mankind’, and ‘the best friend of all children’. Rapturous enthusiasm greeted his every pronouncement. When he took it into his head to author a treatise on linguistics, learned philologists wrote letters to the newspapers humbly thanking the leader for setting them straight.

However gratifying, universal adulation did not relax Stalin’s vigilant concern for his personal power. In the last years of his reign the tyrant took pains to keep his closest associates in a constant state of poisonous antagonism and mutual suspicion. It is not known whether his motivation was authentic fear of conspiracy, belief in the efficacy of divide et impera, or mere perversity. Immediately after the war, Stalin elevated Zhdanov as a counterweight to Malenkov Upon the former’s death, Stalin permitted Malenkov and the chief of the secret police, Beria, to purge Zhdanov’s old power base in Leningrad on the charge of ‘anti-party activity’. This ‘Leningrad affair’ resulted in the expulsion of two thousand communists from party and state jobs and two hundred executions, including that of N. A. Voznesenskii, a member of the Politburo. Stalin then summoned N. S. Khrushchev from Ukraine to Moscow as a counterweight to Malenkov. As for Beria, the Georgian purges of 1951 exterminated many of his staunchest supporters and political clients.

The most ominous manifestation of Stalin’s mistrust of his subordinates occurred in the very last months of his life. In January 1953 the press announced the arrest of nine physicians for conspiring to assassinate the top Soviet leadership with toxic medical treatments. Anti-Semitism, on the ascent in the USSR since the end of the war, figured prominently in the ‘doctor’s plot’—seven of the accused were Jewish. The ‘plot’, it has been speculated, was the first step in a campaign of terror against Jews. In any event, Stalin most probably instigated the affair of the ‘doctor murderers’ to serve as a pretext for the elimination of Beria, and perhaps other high figures in the regime.

Before any of this could happen, on 5 March 1953 Stalin finally died of a stroke. The official announcement of his passing evoked shock and then grief from millions. The dictator’s body reposed in state within the Kremlin, and columns of mourners paid their last respects. Even as a corpse Stalin brought calamity: five hundred people were trampled to death in Moscow because of poor security on the day of his funeral. Stalin was gone, but Stalinism remained. There would ensue a struggle for the succession. And when this was over, Stalin’s heirs would undertake the reconstruction and reform of the system he had bequeathed them.

13. From Stalinism to Stagnation 1953–1985

GREGORY L. FREEZE

After 1953, as the structural faults became increasingly apparent, Stalin’s successors applied various panaceas to repair or conceal the fissures. But neither the spasmodic reformism of Khrushchev nor the systematic standpattism of Brezhnev had much effect. Despite superpower status abroad and repression at home, by the early 1980s the USSR—like its leadership—was tottering on the verge of collapse.

AFTER decades of personalized tyranny, news of Stalin’s illness had a traumatic impact on the population. Recalling the recent ‘doctors’ plot’ (with transparent anti-Semitic overtones), some contemporaries suspected that ‘the doctors are involved in this. If that is confirmed, then the people will be still more outraged against the Jews.’ Many found the idea of life without the all-knowing Vozhd′ (Leader) unthinkable. Hope of instantaneous justice was gone. As one letter to the Central Committee put it: once Stalin is dead, ‘there won’t be anyone to complain to. If something happens now, people say: “We’ll complain to Comrade Stalin”, but now there won’t be anyone.’