When the dictator’s death was announced, his subjects
reacted first as if stunned, and then with mass hysteria. A great silence is
reported to have fallen almost everywhere in the huge empire that he had
dominated, from Rostock on the Baltic to Vladivostok, ten time zones away.
Stalin had been in the tradition of despots who had ruled Eurasia, the most
recent of whom had been Genghiz Khan and Tamerlane, threatening the Balkans,
Persia, China, one sign of their capital a pyramid of skulls. Stalin had their
type of absolute power since 1929, but with modern methods of communication,
and the USSR had been convulsed. The old peasantry had been destroyed, 40
million of them crammed into towns and cities in a few years, many other
millions starved to death or deported, and the rest living a scratch existence.
A vast industrial machinery had been set in place, then there had been more
millions of deaths in the course of political troubles, the ‘Purges’. Then had
come the Second World War, another near 9 million deaths in the armed forces
alone, and no-one knows how many further civilian millions. In 1945 had come
the great victory over Nazi Germany, with Soviet troops conquering Berlin.
Russians, for generations looked down on by Germans as backward and lazy, now
saw tens of thousands of these same Germans marching through the streets of
Moscow as prisoners, some of them losing control of their bowels in fear. Later
on, seven elaborate skyscrapers went up in the capital, built by the captive
German labourers, who were regarded as better bricklayers than ever the Russian
natives would be. (In 1953, 3 million of these prisoners of war were still
working, as forced labour; of the 90,000 men who had surrendered at Stalingrad,
only 9,000 ever managed to return.) Then, in 1949, Communism made another
enormous demonstration of its strength. The Soviet Union exploded its first
bomb. In China, after a long civil war, Mao Tse-tung defeated the
anti-Communist Nationalists, and came to Moscow to celebrate, to get his orders.
So too at intervals did some Mátyás Rákosi or Klement Gottwald from Budapest or
Prague, fresh from some intra-Party knifing, their capitals grimly Stalinized.
In the whole empire, factory chimneys fumed, proclaiming forced
industrialization; in southern Russia there had been cannibalism; in places
there were still shadowy guerrilla wars. But Stalin had not just survived
Hitler; he had turned Russia into a superpower, her capital the centre of a
hemispheric empire.
It was Stalin’s seventieth birthday, 21 December. In the
preceding months, there had been endless tributes in the newspapers. Stalin was
certainly a well-read man, but he claimed to dominate whole ranges of
scholarship – even, at the time of the battle of Stalingrad, contributing an
article to a zoological journal about a particular rock-fish that his rival,
Trotsky, had apparently discovered (in Turkish exile). Now, scholars, artists,
intellectuals, writers praised and imitated him: you had to open any article,
more or less regardless of subject, with quotations from Stalin and Lenin. On
21 December Stalin’s face was shown on an enormous balloon above the Kremlin,
and there were parades throughout the country, with floats to glorify ‘the
greatest genius of all times and nations’. That evening, in the Bolshoy
Theatre, there was a grand gala. On stage was a huge portrait of Stalin, and in
front sat the leaders of Communism: Mao Tse-tung, fresh from his triumph;
leaders of the various countries that the USSR had taken in 1944-5 in central
Europe, including a bearded and weaselly little German, Walter Ulbricht; a
veteran of the Spanish Civil War, ‘passionate’ Dolores Ibárruri, who had been
the chief mouthpiece of the defeated left-wing side (her granddaughter in time
became Russian interpreter for the king of Spain); and a small troop of hard
faces from western Europe. The British, with a tiny Communist Party, were
hardly represented (though, in 1953, for the funeral, a rich
Communist-sympathizing London barrister, John Platts-Mills, did manage to attend,
in his private aircraft), but the French were slavish and the Italians
flattered. In the auditorium sat thousands of delegates, carefully ranked, with
the senior families in the front rows, and, as first to enter, the family of
Lavrenti Beria, who ran the security empire, with the millions of slaving
prisoners. It was he who had stamped the Soviet atom bomb out of the ground,
partly with internment camps, sharashki, where nuclear physicists worked as
convicts. Speeches were then made, for hours on end, and a rising star was
Nikita Khrushchev, whom Stalin had promoted (he was seated on the left, Mao
Tse-tung on the right). Khrushchev’s speech ended with: ‘Glory to our dear
father, our wise teacher, to the brilliant leader of the Party of the Soviet people
and of the workers of the entire world, Comrade Stalin!’
Stalin had sunk monstrously into the consciousness and
subconsciousness of the world, or at any rate the part of the world that he
dominated. For eight years, since the end of the Second World War, his picture
had been everywhere, huge statues had gone up to him, and secret-police chiefs
all through the empire were kept vigilant at the idea that he might make a
telephone call to them in the middle of the night – for his own working hours
were strange. In the end, they killed him.
In 1953 Stalin was seventy-three and age was showing. The
suspiciousness grew, and when his physical health seemed to be weakening,
suspicion caused him to have his own doctors arrested, imprisoned, tortured to
make them confess that there was a medical plot afoot. Then came signs that he
was planning another culling of chief subordinates – Beria especially. In the
1930s, he had killed off three quarters of the Central Committee, along with
much of the senior military establishment and then, for good measure, the chief
of security who had organized it all. Now, the senior men could read the
telltale signs that the old man was meditating another great purge. On the face
of things, he could still be affable and welcoming, and on the night of 28
February/1 March he did stage one of his dinner parties, at which he liked
people to get drunk (on one occasion a British ambassador had to be carried
out). He told the servants not to wake him: he was usually around by midday in
any event. But on 1 March, no. The bewildered staff did not know what to do,
and, again because of the suspiciousness, there was no chief domestic secretary
to take any responsibility; he had been carted off months before. The servants,
with the 1,500 security guards posted all around, waited. A light finally did
go on, at about six o’clock, in the quarters he had chosen for the night (out
of suspicion, he changed his bedroom regularly, to foil would-be assassins).
Then nothing more. Finally, since a document had arrived for him to read, a
maid was sent into Stalin’s room. She found him on the floor, obviously victim
of a stroke. He could hardly move or speak: only the terrible, malignant eyes
had life in them.
Still no-one was prepared to take responsibility: the
servants, the ministers they telephoned; only Beria could react. He told them
to remain silent about the stroke, and arrived that night. The system being so
strange, Stalin had remained for ten hours or so without medical attention, and
now they had to go and ask his chief doctor in the special prison what he would
advise. Beria himself at first told the guards to go, that Stalin was
‘sleeping’, and by the time doctors arrived, Stalin had been unattended for
twelve hours. Did Beria do this deliberately? Stalin’s drunken son burst in, on
3 March, shrieked that they had killed him, and according to Molotov, Beria
said as much: ‘I did away with him, I saved you all.’ As the old man slid into
and out of coma, Beria did not bother to hide his hatred; by 3 March the
doctors pronounced that there was no hope, and death came two days later, with
a final scene that his daughter remembered:
He literally choked to death as we watched. At what
seemed like the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance
over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry
and full of the fear of death . . . He suddenly lifted his hand as though he
were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on us all
• the old housekeeper in hysterics, on her knees the
while, as members of the Party executive came and went, and Beria, at the end,
hardly able to control his glee.
Between themselves, before Stalin died, they managed to
cobble together an agreement to take over the government, without any immediate
fuss, and Beria emerged as the main man, with the Ministry of the Interior, to
which would be attached the Ministry of State Security. Division of these two
had been one of the signs that Stalin intended to strip Beria of his full
powers, whittle him down and then eliminate him. In the same way, the new men
reversed an arrangement that Stalin had made, to expand the size of the Party’s
leading body, the ‘Praesidium’ (the old Politburo), to twenty-five as against
an original ten. The ten older members would have been swamped by the new ones
– an obvious way in which the old man could prepare to get rid of them. With at
least some agreement, the new leaders were prepared to let the people know, at
last, of Stalin’s death. The body was embalmed and laid out, and crowds upon
crowds came to see it. Pandemonium followed, and hundreds of people were
crushed to death in the middle of Moscow.
What were the new leaders to do? They were themselves
Stalinists, involved in all of his doings, with hardly a scruple to be
detected. The one with the worst record was obviously enough Beria, and the
others had every reason to fear the power that he could use against them: one
of the first things that he had done, when Stalin began to die, was to go and
remove top-secret documents from the dictator’s desk. What did they contain?
Already, said Khrushchev in his memoirs, his colleagues were wary, with little
signs to each other of apprehension as to what Beria might do. They apportioned
the various offices among themselves, and Khrushchev got what seemed to be the
least of them – he was one among eight other secretaries of the Central
Committee – while Georgy Malenkov took Stalin’s seat as head of the Council of
Ministers. In the system, and the problem grew more complicated without a
dictator, offices sometimes lacked the power that their names should have
meant. Did the Party govern, and what was the role of the State in that event?
And which part of the Party really had the power – the police or security
element, later known as the KGB? These questions came up as soon as Stalin had
died, and a struggle for power duly commenced.
However, to start with, there was a somewhat strange
business. The Stalin tyranny began to be whittled down, and elements of
liberalization came in. People started to come back from the huge prison camp
network. Some, when arrested, had had the kind of acute intelligence that
Communism fostered – a matter of survival, to guess what to do – and had
confessed to crimes that were manifestly ridiculous. Thus, the director of the
Leningrad Zoo had confessed that he had staged ballet rehearsals outside the
cages so as to drive the monkeys mad. Any commission looking into ‘crimes’
would of course at once spot a preposterous one, and release the man. But there
were other pieces of relaxation that touched on the two central themes of
Soviet history from then onwards. These had to do with the non-Russian peoples
on the one side, and relations with Germany on the other. Both themes now came
up, and it was a measure of the strangeness of the system that the liberalizer,
in both, was Beria, the man of Terror whom his colleages feared. However, given
that this was a system in which information was very carefully doled out or
distorted, the secret police were the agency best able to know what was going
on, through a huge network of spies, and experts on various foreign countries.
Beria knew well enough that the country was poor, sometimes famished, living in
often disgusting conditions. Oppression at home and abroad cost an enormous
amount, distorting production. Liberalization would solve some of this. Half of
the USSR’s population consisted of non-Russians, and these had generally been
run, tyrannically, through Russian Communists. In the Ukraine, where there had still
been nationalist partisans fighting in the forests until very recently,
Russians, not Ukrainians, had been trusted and in the Caucasus, the Baltic,
Central Asia, it had been much the same. Whole peoples had been transported, in
any event – the Chechens, for instance, to far-off Kazakhstan, along with the
Tatars of the Crimea, who lost half of their population in the process (the
Chechens, once they arrived, decided to reintroduce polygamy, so that their
population could be restored). Now, Beria allowed some non-Russian Communists
to take over, locally. Even in 1953 it caused head-shaking in Moscow. Stalin
had survived Hitler’s attack largely because he put himself at the head of a
Russian national movement, as distinct from a Communist one. What would happen
if loyal Russians were now displaced by slippery Georgians and, worse still,
Central Asians, who would use their power to instal their brothers and their
cousins and their uncles through some hidden tribal or even sectarian network?
Playing off the nationalities against Moscow was dangerous; in the end it
brought down the USSR. There were pre-echoes of that in Beria’s post-Stalin
months.
But he also had a sense of strategy in foreign affairs.
Stalin may have been absolute master at home, but he had the modern countries
all against him, and a war was going on, pointlessly, in the middle of Korea.
In 1945, when Hitler’s Germany had been smashed, the USSR had been in alliance
with the West, and various arrangements for the post-war period had been drawn up.
From Beria’s viewpoint, these had gone very badly wrong: the West had been
misplayed. NATO now existed and it united western Europe, despite the existence
in France and Italy of strong Communist parties; West Berlin was a leech
attached to a main artery of the Soviet system; West German industry was
recovering fast and would clearly be used for the rearmament of the country.
The same was coming to pass in Japan. What had the USSR got in return for this?
Peasant countries on her borders, each quite complicated. It had also gained
East Germany, now dressed up as the ‘German Democratic Republic’, but everyone
knew that it was a fake state. The chief element was that American troops were
stationed in western Europe, that nuclear weaponry was in the air, that western
Europe was overcoming the post-war crises, and American officials were all
around, to encourage freer trade, both within Europe and with the USA. From Moscow’s
viewpoint this was all very alarming, maybe presaging a general attack, and in
his last years Stalin himself expected a war. Beria knew different: no-one
knowing, through the extraordinarily highly placed Soviet spies, what was
really being calculated in the West could have any serious idea that it would
go to war. If NATO existed, if the Americans maintained a military presence in
Europe, this was purely in response to Soviet provocations – a long list of
cruelty and unnecessary aggression, including even the continued use of old
Nazi concentration camps. There were still some idealists who chose to go and
live in the ‘German Democratic Republic’, or ‘the other Germany’ – Bertolt
Brecht the main one, though there were other men and women who had detested
California. Disillusionment followed.
At this stage, German reunification was still a matter for
diplomatic competition. The West argued for free elections, and meanwhile got
the United Nations, which the West at the time controlled, to set up a
commission to study the subject (it was refused entry to East Germany). At the
time, there was also question of a German contribution to defence – the
European Defence Community being the chief vehicle for this, and part of the
post-Marshall arrangements that were the basis of the later European
unification. This of course worried Moscow – she had always feared an alliance
against her of the entire West, Germany included. Now, some of those same
German generals who had reached Leningrad, Moscow, the lower Volga and the
Caucasus were apparently being groomed again for an attack. Stalin himself had
responded with a note, of 10 March 1952, which became famous, and over the
interpretation of which some foolish historical statements have been made. He
proposed the formation of a German government, to include the East; it would be
recognized for the purposes of a peace treaty; Germany would be neutral, i.e.
would not join any Western organization at all, including the economic ones;
and might have her own army; and would be able to return civil and political
rights. East German Communists proudly assured the Left-leaning Italian
socialist Pietro Nenni that they would soon be in much the same position as the
Italian Communist Party, i.e. waiting in the wings for power. Stalin also still
had millions of prisoners in his thrall, whose return would be a considerable
gift. The aim, overall, was at German national sentiment – there was even
mention of giving political rights back to SS men – at the very moment when
treaties signed in Bonn and Paris for a European army were supposed to be
ratified, and the timing was not coincidental. The three Western powers
consulted, and they then put the question as to free elections; they also said
that a future German government should be free to choose alliances. The
exchanges went on until September, always failing on these two points, since
the USSR would never accept a united Germany, allied with the West, and despite
some effort with the small print, never accepted that the elections would be
really free. Anti-Cold War historians held the Stalin note up as evidence that
the man was sincere about German neutrality and unification, ‘Finlandization’
as it came to be called, but subsequent evidence shows that he gave the matter
much thought – the note went through fourteen versions, three of them annotated
by him – and seems to have been possessed by the notion that he could deliver a
Communist Germany, just as Czechoslovakia had produced a strong Party. The
Party of Socialist Unity (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland, or SED) in
East Germany was groomed for control of the entire country, and was told to
accelerate ‘the construction of socialism’ in April 1950. The next Party
congress, in July, went ahead with collectivization of agriculture,
heavy-industrial plans and the extinction of small-scale trade and workshops.
If Stalin did not get the Germany he wanted, he would in other words at least
get his bit of Germany to fall into line.
In any event, the West Germans quite clearly preferred their
freedom to their national unification. Adenauer, the Christian Democratic
leader, was certain that there could be no honest arrangement with the USSR and
was determined to go ahead with the Western programme, even if that meant
accepting a divided Germany. He worried that the West might let him down, with
some Allied conference that would leave Germany at Moscow’s mercy – some
European security arrangement of the sort had even been suggested by an
American Secretary of State (James F. Byrnes) in 1946. He also had an argument,
that a prosperous and democratic West Germany would in the end act as a magnet
for the East as a whole: and so indeed it did, though Adenauer (and the
Frenchman, Schuman) were reckoning on up to ten years, and not nearly forty.
The West Germans went ahead with rearmament plans and even conscription,
although many of the Social Democrats detested the idea, as for that matter did
some of the Christian Democrats. The French, too, had swallowed their doubts,
despite threats of ‘Guns for Huns’. The Soviet side had offered (and Molotov stressed
the offer again in 1954) some European security system that would include the
USSR but exclude the USA and of course NATO Germany. This idea, to be launched
with the sort of large international conference that the USSR could quite
easily manipulate (the other countries being divided among themselves, with a
number of small ones to cause trouble), was now in the air. It was ‘Europe for
the Europeans’, and it later grew nuclear-free extrapolations; in time it
became ‘our common European home’ – a famous enough expression, later on, under
Gorbachev, but promoted before him by much harder men. The idea was not
unpopular in some circles in Germany and elsewhere, and even had attractions on
the Right. But there was one unshakably strong argument against it: Stalin and
all his works, particularly the repulsive little state in East Germany. Its
capital, East Berlin, had been rebuilt in homage to Moscow. The centre, the
Alexander-Platz, was a gigantic field of concrete, and off it marched the
Stalin-Allee, another hideous boulevard of concrete, with a peculiar smell,
partly made-up of local low-quality coal and partly of the Soviet method of oil
refinery. Along it went lorries, packed with rubble, and occasional large,
curtained, black cars, carrying the unlovely Communist bosses. There was
another peculiarity to East Berlin. Bomb damage did not mean that old buildings
were torn down, as in the West. Instead, they were patched together, at least
in areas such as the Schönhauser Allee or the Vinetastrasse, outside of the
international gaze, ripe for ‘gentrification’ two generations down the line,
but at the time almost uninhabitable. No German in his senses would want to
live there.
The tensions of 1952 were such that Stalin was obviously
thinking of a war, and he told Mao to prepare for one. Then came, perhaps in
preparation for it, a new ‘purge’, both at home and in the satellite states, to
dispose of potential traitors before they had time to act. He did not trust
Jews at all, and they were, in the main, eliminated from leading positions in
the satellite states, and from influential ones in Moscow, though the Budapest
ones had an adhesive quality, and he sacrificed some gentiles instead. Paranoia
of an extreme kind reigned, but Stalin was untouchable, had knees knocking, and
his nominees, while secretly hating the system, could only wait for his death.
Such was the position on 5 March 1953. Beria, with
understanding from Georgy Malenkov, now moved into the vacuum, took charge of
things, and had a strategy of his own. In the first place, Stalin’s crude
challenges to the West had left no room for the divisions within it. We now
know, for instance, that the Americans were not really using West Germany as a
tool against the USSR: up to 1950, they regarded Bonn as a provisional
solution, and one that had been forced upon them; they still used the machinery
set up at Potsdam. But then had come the Korean War, and in 1952 Eisenhower was
elected President on a strongly anti-Soviet platform: he seemed even to be
saying that the USA should make use of its then enormous superiority in nuclear
weapons. The Germans themselves were divided, and the one argument that
Adenauer could always use was that East Germany was a tyrannically run place –
no advertisement for life under ‘socialism’. The new leaders were clearly
anxious to soften the line, and various things followed from this – on 27 March
a limited amnesty (10,000 people, including Molotov’s Jewish wife); on 4 April,
release of the imprisoned doctors of the ‘plot’; on 10 June, dropping of Soviet
claims against Turkey; in June, resumption of relations with Yugoslavia and
even Israel; in the same period, the Chinese at last made the vital concession
in Korea, with an armistice declared in July. In fact, on 19 March the new
leaders, including the true Stalinist Molotov, agreed that the Korean War must
be stopped, and the Chinese foreign minister, Chou En-lai, got his orders to
that effect on 21 March, in Moscow.
To all of this there was a nuclear background: the USSR was
weak in that respect, and needed respite from Stalin’s warring, his turning
every neighbour into an enemy. The essential question remained Germany, and
here there were divisions, with Molotov following the Party line, to the effect
that a Communist East Germany was a necessity. Beria had other ideas, and
probably regarded the Party with contempt. Why not try a new tactic altogether:
prepare to get rid of East Germany, Walter Ulbricht and all, in exchange for a
Germany that would collaborate economically and politically? Such was the model
of Rapallo, the Italian town where, in 1922, the USSR and Republican Germany,
bizarrely represented by elderly homosexuals in pyjamas, had entered upon
semi-alliance. Then, the two countries, isolated, made an agreement that even
included considerable German help for Soviet industry and for that matter
Soviet help for the German military. A normal and parliamentary Germany,
detached from the West? A sort of Finland? And if it meant getting rid of
little Ulbricht, why not?
Of course, in the then Soviet system, such things were not
written down, and when eventually ‘revelations’ from the archives emerged, they
did not really reveal anything more than would have been known to readers of
the Reader’s Digest at its purest. Even Walter Pieck, a lieutenant of
Ulbricht’s, kept a diary in a code of a code of a summary. Stray lines in
memoirs alone ensured that something of the truth emerged. Once Beria started
to suggest sacrificing East Germany for a new Rapallo, a strange episode
followed. East Germany had been whipped into following the Soviet course, and
half a million of her people left, through Berlin. Walter Ulbricht was asking
for Soviet economic assistance and was told to move more slowly with ‘the
construction of socialism’. The Praesidium discussed this on 27 May and sent a
Note to the East Germans. Such documents had a character all their own. There
would be a thick framework of ‘wooden language’, unreadable if you were not
initiated. Men who sat through six-hour speeches of industrial statistics at
enormous Party gatherings, applauding at the right moments, with stewards
lining the wall, holding stopwatches, and indicating ‘stop’ when the designated
speaker’s designated applause had been completed, were indeed initiated. If
they just listened, they would find that at some point there would be a passage
meaning something. This was a way of demonstrating the leaders’ power
(similarly, if one of them gave an interview, the technique was to answer a
question at enormous length, boring the interviewer into the ground).
On 2 June the Soviet Note said the East German leadership
should, ‘to make the present political situation more healthy and to
consolidate our position in Germany and the international arena, act over the
German question such as to create a united, democratic, peaceful and
independent Germany’. This was referred to as a ‘new course’ and there was to
be some liberalization in East Germany; some of the ‘construction of socialism’
measures were to be cancelled, and the Soviet Control Commission would be
replaced by a civilian, Vladimir Semyonov, political adviser to the Control
Commission, a member of the NKVD and close to Beria. He was to replace Ulbricht
with more pliable figures – Rudolf Herrnstadt, editor of the Party newspaper, and
Wilhelm Zaisser, head of East German security, also close to Beria. After all,
even East German Communists were sometimes uncomfortable with being hated and
lied to. At the same time reparations were ended, and the Soviet firms set up
to exploit East Germany were disbanded. Beria was in effect giving some sense
to the Stalin Note of March 1952 – not intending full-scale Communization of
Germany but, instead, looking for co-operation or ‘Finlandization’. From 2 to 4
June there was a conference at Berlin, ‘the new course’ being explained to
Ulbricht. He went ahead with some concessions as far as small trade and farmers
were concerned, and he released a few hundred political prisoners, but he did
nothing to lessen the load on the industrial workers. His goal was a Communist
Germany. That had been the whole purpose of his life, and he probably had some
sort of encouragement from within Moscow. Ulbricht knew how the system worked.
He resisted the pressure, and instead launched a ‘provocation’ (meaning, in Continental
and Communist parlance, an action designed to produce its opposite). He decreed
at once, in mid-May, that each worker must produce 10 per cent more, while
rations went down – equivalent to a drop in wages and an increase in hours
worked. The provocation duly provoked trouble. On 16 June there were
demonstrations in the very centre of ‘the construction of socialism’, by
builders working on the grotesque Stalin-Allee. Did Beria’s enemies stage a
provocation, to discredit ‘the new course’ and Beria, in collusion with
Ulbricht and Pieck, who had been trotting in and out of Soviet offices? Or were
the demonstrations just what they purported to be, a rising against
exploitation? On 17 June the unrest spread, with workers in the big factories
in other centres of industry joining in. That day, the Soviet authorities
declared martial law and sent in tanks; some 200 people were killed. The whole
episode gave the West, and West Germany in particular, excellent propaganda.
It also discredited Beria. A conspiracy now grew against
him, and it was inspired by Nikita Khrushchev. He had the very useful talent,
in that system, of threatening no-one. He had risen through the Party, some of
the time as manager of Moscow (where he tore down many old buildings). He was
fat and piggy-eyedly jovial, and had a rustic air: his colleagues wrote him off
as second-rate. When they agreed on the post-Stalin arrangements, their idea
was to return to the days when the secretary of the Central Committee was just
a technician, drowning in files. But Stalin himself had used that
administrative post to great effect, because the other men in the Politburo
ignored him while they fought among themselves; he controlled appointments to
this or that Party function, and knew who was who. Khrushchev also knew how to
do this, promoting men who would later be very useful allies. Meanwhile, given
the fear of Beria that existed among the others, there was some response to
Khrushchev’s prompting when he told them that Beria must be overthrown. The
Berlin affair gave him a very good excuse. He had another useful ally. The war
hero Marshall Georgy Zhukov had been sidelined by Stalin, and the successors
brought him back as deputy defence minister: that meant troops on their side.
The plotters were careful never to talk openly, there being informants or
‘bugs’ all around; they behaved towards Beria as if all were normal, even
chaffing him about his spies, and in Khrushchev’s case accepting lifts in his
car.
On 26 June a meeting of the Praesidium of the Council of
Ministers had been called by Malenkov, who had been left in the chair. He was
programmed to say at some stage that Party matters On 26 June a meeting of the
Praesidium of the Council of Ministers had been called by Malenkov, who had
been left in the chair. He was programmed to say at some stage that Party
matters should be discussed, and that Beria’s office needed to be rationalized.
Beria’s men were sitting outside the room as usual, and they had to be
neutralized: that was done by Zhukov’s men, who had had weapons smuggled in.
Beria arrived (as usual) self-important and late, with a briefcase. Malenkov
opened up, questioning Beria’s role, and when Beria opened the briefcase,
intending to take out papers, the conspirators feared that he would produce a
gun and called in Zhukov’s men. They arrested him and, when dusk fell, smuggled
him out of the Kremlin, wrapped in a carpet. He went off to a military prison,
where he was soon joined by his closest collaborators, the torturer Viktor
Abakumov especially. Written pleas, hysterical in tone, went out from the cells
to Malenkov, but after a secret trial Beria was executed the following December.
His crimes were publicly denounced by his ex-colleagues. Indirectly, he was
taking the blame for what Stalin had done, and they were distancing themselves
as best they could from the tyrant: Communism was to have a human face.
Khrushchev, the least regarded of these colleagues, did
indeed have a human face, though pachydermic, and he was now asserting himself.
In appearance, Malenkov had the chief role, but he had been Beria’s associate,
and the next stage was for him to be eliminated. Yet again, Khrushchev was
underestimated: he now became, in September, first secretary of the Central
Committee, and thereby controlled agendas and appointments, and so low did the
others rate him that his nomination came only after several other apparently
more pressing items on the Central Committee’s list of topics for the day.
Meanwhile, Malenkov had his own ideas as to liberalization. Prices were cut,
and peasant taxes also; he even proposed allowing peasants to have small plots
of their own, whereas in Stalin’s time all of the land was supposedly
collective in case peasants were tempted to work privately, for themselves.
Other ideas came up. For instance, there had long been a tension between Party
and State, in the sense that the machinery of the State did not have any
independence, operating as the Party wanted, and through Party nominees (the
nomenklatura of people ‘cleared’ by the Party). This had economic consequences,
in that industry might be shaped by some powerful boss, to build up his own
empire, regardless of economic sense, and there was similar trouble with
appointments, as square pegs were put into round holes. Late in 1953 Malenkov
told the Party that some government agencies must be removed from its control,
and made himself very unpopular. Besides, Khrushchev set himself up as the
agricultural specialist, and made little effort to conceal the truth – that
Russians were eating less well than they had done before the Revolution itself.
In 1954 Malenkov was gradually effaced, Party defeating government; early in
1955 he was formally demoted by the others. Khrushchev had won.
Nikita Khrushchev was of just the generation to think that
Communism would triumph, worldwide. He was born of peasant stock in a small
town of the Ukraine, Yuzovka (now Donetsk), his family straight from the land,
mostly illiterate. Yuzovka took its very name from foreign capital, in that the
man who developed its mines was a Welshman called Hughes, and the young
Khrushchev went down the mines. But the family did not drink, his parents
pushed him, he acquired an education because his mother enlisted the help of a
priest (Khrushchev, like so many Bolsheviks, was a good mathematician), and
when the Revolution came, he joined in and worked his way up. This was all quite
standard for the USSR in the twenties and thirties: the peasant Khrushchevs
displaced the Jewish intellectual Trotskys who had originally led the
Revolution (a quarter of Party deaths in the early twenties were suicides).
Stalin controlled whole waves of men like Khrushchev, and was very cunning in
setting them against each other. He also made sure that they had to take their
share of responsibility in his rule of murder and mass imprisonment, and
Khrushchev’s own career shows that he joined in without demur. But he was
himself quite cunning, and learned that, if you wanted to advance in Soviet
politics, you needed not to be a threat to anyone, even not to be taken
seriously at all. His role at the top level was to play the buffoon who
nevertheless somehow got things done. In manner, Khrushchev was that Russian
figure, the clown, but, as Arthur Koestler said, a clown can look very
sinister, seen close to.
Khrushchev was not the type of man to have doubts about the
eventual victory of Communism. It had catapulted him from Yuzovka to the
Kremlin, of course, but it had also catapulted Russia. In the days of Yuzovka,
she had counted as backward, filled with illiterate peasants, and she had lost
a war against Germany. After the Revolution, she had become a great industrial
country and defeated Germany. There was much wrong with this very simple
picture, but that would not have crossed Khrushchev’s mind: Communism had
started off with a meeting, of about forty people, in 1903, and now look where
it was – dominating more of the world than the British Empire had done.
Khrushchev himself, the former peasant and apprentice miner, now had an
educated family, with a grand apartment overlooking the Moskva river, and grand
offices in the Kremlin. He could snap his fingers, and the President of the USA
would jump. Not bad for a boy from Yuzovka: the Revolution would win.
